THEOLOGY AND LAW. 243 



Aristotle and the Stoics, had it not. . . . This 

 idea came into the world through Christianity, in 

 which the individual, as such, has an infinite worth 

 as being the aim and object of the love of God." 

 But looking back through the revelation of the 

 Old Testament, we can see how the Jews were 

 trained and educated up to the fulness of the 

 truth, as side by side with the patria potestas we 

 see the personal relations of patriarch and prophet 

 with God. Nor is the idea of Personality the only 

 gift of Revelation to Law. In the Decalogue and 

 the Sermon on the Mount it has unfolded the 

 Royal Law, and it has revealed it to us as the will 

 of a Personal Being, "Our Father, which is in 

 heaven." 



And it is because it is God's Law that we may 

 love it. We cannot love an abstraction, an idea, 

 a generalization, a uniformity. Yet the UQth 

 Psalm is full of love and devotion to the Law, 

 because it is God's. And it is just here that the 

 Christian conception of Law is so much truer than 

 that which we are familiar with in Aristotle or even 

 in Kant. The older philosopher glories in the 

 impersonality of law, as contrasted with the 

 injustice of individual judgments. So far we can 

 go with him. But Aristotle's fear of what is 

 human, and his indefinite attitude towards what 

 is Divine, leaves us with a law which we cannot 

 love. It may be just and good and true. It may 



