viii OBITUARY NOTICES OF MEMBERS DECEASED. 



seems to have been by the following route. In the desultory reading 

 of his long period of ill health, he had taken up the French memoir 

 writers and chroniclers. Following the bent of a naturally logical 

 mind he had traced these writers backward in time from Commines 

 to Monstrelet, from Froissart to the Chronicjues de St. Denis and 

 Villehardouin, till, in the Middle Ages, he had found himself in a 

 new world, faced and surrounded by the conceptions of mediaeval 

 law and the mediaeval church. Once having become interested in 

 this body of institutions he was more and more impressed with its 

 significance; he perceived the influence of mediaeval jurisprudence 

 and the mediaeval church on modern times ; and to this phase of 

 the history of civilization he devoted the studies of the remainder 

 of his life. 



But Mr. Lea's studies were still only one of his interests. He 

 was deeply moved by the questions raised by the Civil War and took 

 an active part in the work of their solution. His labors in the 

 national cause as well as those in the cause of municipal and civil 

 service reform I must leave to rpore competent hands for descrip- 

 tion. I may, however, refer to his characteristic recourse to his pen 

 to reach his objects. During the height of the dispute concerning 

 slavery, when Bishop Hopkins's pamphlet, the " Bible View of 

 Slavery," was issued and widely circulated as a defence of that insti- 

 tution on Biblical grounds, jNIr. Lea wrote a parody, the " Bible View 

 of Polygamy," showing that just as good a case might be made out 

 from the Bible for the one institution as the other. Later, as a 

 warning in our treatment of the American Indians, he wrote an 

 article on the " Indian Policy of Spain," and on the outbreak of the 

 Spanish war he published an article in the Atlantic Monthly of July, 

 1908, suggesting the deep-lying causes of the decadence of Spain. 

 When we took up new responsibilities in the Philippines, he pub- 

 lished a pamphlet called " The Dead Hand," utilizing the experience 

 of Catholic governments to show the evils of the possession of land 

 by ecclesiastical bodies. These are only a few examples of much 

 more than a score of pamphlets, articles and open letters called forth 

 by public crises in wdiich Mr. Lea took a keen interest and to the 

 solution of which he always felt that history had something to 

 contribute. 



