268 PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 



&quot; There can be little doubt that the church or temple of primitive 

 society was the self-same spot as the assembly-place of the people and 

 the court of justice.&quot; 



In support of this last conclusion it may be remarked tliat 

 as in early times gatherings for worship afforded occasions 

 for trading, so they also afforded occasions for legal settle 

 ments of disputes; and further that the use of the sacred 

 edifice for this purpose (as among the Babylonians) was 

 congruous with the conception, everywhere anciently enter 

 tained, that legal proceedings tacitly or avowedly invoked 

 divine interposition tacitly in the taking of an oath and 

 avowedly in trial by judicial combat. 



The conquest of northern heathenism by Christianity 

 gradually led to subjugation of the heathen system of law by 

 the system of law the Church imposed partly its own, the 

 canon law, and partly, that inherited from Roman civiliza 

 tion, the civil law. The rules of conduct which, transmit! ed 

 from the heathen priesthood, had become the common la w, 

 were in large measure overriden by the rules of conduct 

 which the Christian priesthood either enacted or adopted. 

 In early English days lay and clerical magnates cooperated 

 in the local courts: laws derived from the old religion and 

 from the new religion were jointly enforced. 



&quot;The clergy, in particular, as they then engrossed almost every 

 other branch of learning, so (like their predecessors, the British 

 Druids), they were peculiarly remarkable for their proficiency in the 

 study of the law. . . . The judges therefore were usually created out 

 of the sacred order, as was likewise the case among the Normans ; 

 and all the inferior offices were supplied by the lower clergy, which 

 has occasioned their successors to be denominated clerics to this da} . 

 But with the growth of papal power a change began. As 

 writes the author just quoted, Stephen 



&quot; It soon became an established maxim in the papal system of policy, 

 that all ecclesiastical persons, and all ecclesiastical causes, should be 

 solely and entirely subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction only.&quot; 



After the conquest, when shoals of foreign clergy came 

 over, and when they and the pre-existing monastic clergy. 



