228 CEREMONIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



dination; and inflicting penalties on men who injure others 

 not because of the intrinsic badness of their acts but because 

 their acts break the ruler s commands; has ever been ha 

 bituating men to obey regulations conducive to social order; 

 until there has grown up a consciousness that these regu 

 lations have not simply an extrinsic authority derived from 

 a ruler s will, but have an intrinsic authority derived from 

 their utility. The once arbitrary, fitful, and often irra 

 tional, dictates of a king, grow into an established system of 

 laws, which formulate the needful limitations to men s ac 

 tions arising from one another s claims. And these limita 

 tions men more and more recognize and conform to, not only 

 without thinking of the monarch s injunctions, but without 

 thinking of the injunctions set forth in Acts of Parlia 

 ment. Simultaneously, out of the supposed wishes 

 of the ancestral ghost, which now and again developing 

 into the traditional commands of some expanded ghost of a 

 great man, become divine injunctions, arises the set of re 

 quirements classed as religious. Within these, at first al 

 most exclusively concerning acts expressing submission to 

 the celestial king, there evolve the rules we distinguish as 

 moral. As society advances, these moral rules become of a 

 kind formulating the conduct requisite for personal, domes 

 tic, and social wellbeing. For a long time imperfectly dif 

 ferentiated from the essential political rules, and to the last 

 enforcing their authority, these moral rules, originally re 

 garded as sacred only because of their supposed divine ori 

 gin, eventually acquire a sacredness derived from their 

 observed utility in controlling certain parts of human con 

 duct parts not controlled, or little controlled, by civil law. 

 Ideas of moral duty develop and consolidate into a moral 

 code, which eventually becomes independent of its theologi 

 cal root. In the meantime, from within that part of 

 ceremonial rule which has evolved into a system of regula 

 tions for social intercourse, there grows a third class of re 

 straints; and these, in like manner, become at length inde- 



