296 ON THE NOTIONS OF EIGHT AND JUSTICE 



outside of the commonwealth or among those who are 

 sharers in supreme power (of whom there are sometimes 

 several even in the same commonwealth) there is the 

 sphere of the voluntary law of nations, accepted by the 

 tacit consent of the peoples. . . . 



But Christians have also another common bond, namely 

 the positive Divine law [jus] which is contained in the sacred 

 books. To which are to be added the sacred canons 

 received by the whole Church and afterwards in the West 

 the Papal law [jures] to which kings and peoples submit 

 themselves. And in general (and certainly not against 

 reason) it seems for a long time to have been accepted, 

 before the schism of last century, that there should be 

 understood to be a certain general commonwealth of the 

 Christian nations, the heads of which were in sacred 

 things the Pope [Pontifex Maximus] and in temporal 

 things the Emperor of the Romans, who also seemed to 

 retain so much of the law of the old Roman monarchy 

 as was needed for the common good of Christendom, 

 without prejudice to the Right of kings and the liberty 

 of princes. 



order to reign both by natural right and by civil right, like the 

 first kings in the world, who having been raised to the government 

 of their peoples by their virtue and their intellectual gifts, com- 

 nianded as much by nature as by law, by merit as by fortune.' 



