LITERARY NOTICES. 



41; 



outside of arguments and above them are 

 facts in the form of official documents, civil 

 and ecclesiastical, representing different pe- 

 riods of the history of the Church, that 

 help to show how the prevailing notions and 

 usages regarding Sunday have grown up and 

 been fortified, and are, therefore, of general 

 iutci'est. These facts, which are established 

 by full quotations from the original rescripts, 

 are held to illustrate the real nature of the 

 Sunday question of to-day, and to be fitted 

 to guide to a way of dealing with it ; for, the 

 author says, "Every effort to remodel existing 

 Sunday legislation, or to forecast its future, 

 must be made in the light of the past." 

 From the setting forth of the compilation, 

 Dr. Lewis draws the conclusion that the first 

 Sunday legislation was the product of that 

 pagan conception of the Romans which 

 made religion a department of the state. It 

 appears in the form of an edict by Constan- 

 tine as Pontifex Maximus, a. d. 321, order- 

 ing the observance of " the venerable day of 

 the sun," in which no reference is made to 

 Christianity. The first designation of this 

 day of the sun as " the Lord's Day " appears 

 sixty-five years later, or in a. d. 386, in con- 

 nection with the mention of pagan and im- 

 perial holidays " baptized with new names 

 and slightly modified. . . . During the middle 

 ages Sunday legislation took on a more 

 Judaistic type, under the plea of analogy, 

 whereby civil authorities claimed the right 

 to legislate in religious matters, after the 

 manner of the Jewish theocracy." The 

 Continental Reformation made little change 

 in the civil legislation on the subject. The 

 early Anglo-Saxon laws were historically, 

 and therefore, probably, logically, the prod- 

 uct of the middle age legislation of the " Ho- 

 ly Roman Empire." " The English laws 

 are an expansion of the Saxon, and the 

 American are a transcript of the English." 

 Thus the author believes that he traces a 

 historic continuity in the legislation from 

 paganism till to-day. " In the Sunday legis- 

 lation of the Roman Empire, the religious 

 element was subordinate to the civil. In the 

 middle ages, under Cromwell, and during 

 our colonial period, the Church was prac- 

 tically supreme." Any claim that Sunday 

 legislation is not based on religious ground 

 " is contradicted by the facts of all the cent- 

 uries. Every Sunday law sprang from a 

 TOL. XXXIII. — 27 



religious sentiment " ; originally pagan, then 

 gradually modified by the interweaving of 

 the Christian idea of commemorating Christ's 

 resurrection ; then in the middle ages mak- 

 ing a substitution of Sunday for the Sabbath 

 of the Jewish theocracy. The historical re- 

 view concludes with analyses of the Sunday 

 laws of the several United States. While 

 argument on Sunday legislation is not in- 

 tended, the bearing of the book is against it 

 as not being a function of political govern- 

 ment; except so far as to preserve civil 

 order, and particularly to repress the liquor- 

 traffic on the day, the leisure of which gives 

 so many opportunities for rioting and crimi- 

 nality. 



Principles and Practice of Morality. By 



EZEKIEL GiLMAN RoBINSON. Bostoii : De 



Silver, Rogers k Co. Pp. 264. Price, 



$1.50. 



This treatise is designed as a text-book, 

 and has grown out of the lectures which the 

 author — who is President of Brown Univer- 

 sity — has given to his classes in ethics, when 

 no existing text-book was found sufficient 

 for the occasion. Ethical theories have been 

 modified to a marked degree by the exhaust- 

 ive discussions to which they have been sub- 

 jected in recent years ; and the resultant 

 changes do not pass unobserved in the 

 treatise, but are kept in mind when not 

 formally referred to. Yet existing contro- 

 versies are touched upon only so far as is 

 necessary for the elucidation or defense of 

 the positions here taken. Distinction is 

 made between the science and the philosophy 

 of ethics, the former being regarded as that 

 which teaches what is moral, the latter as 

 illustrating why it is moral. This brings up 

 the consideration of the sources of moral ob- 

 Ugation, or, as the author expresses it, with 

 some originality of language, " the origin of 

 the feeling of oughtness," to which consid- 

 erable prominence is given, and in the dis- 

 cussion of which may be found the central 

 point of Dr. Robinson's theory. The later 

 theories on this subject — designated as the 

 Hegelian, which makes the standard one of 

 general contemporary recognition, or con- 

 ventional ; the evolutionary, which sup- 

 poses it to have been developed or evolved ; 

 and the historical, which assumes it to be 

 the fruit of experience — are declared insuffi- 

 cient to account for it. While the last two 



