THE BRITISH ACADEMY
By
The Rev. C. H. W. Johns, M.A., Litt.D.
Master of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge
The Schweich Lectures
1912
London
Published for the British Academy
By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press
Amen Corner, E.C.
1914
OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
It has long been held that the laws of the Israelites, as revealed byGod to Moses, by him embodied in the books of the Pentateuch andsince preserved by the zealous care of the Jewish people, are incomparable.Accordingly they have been adopted professedly by mostChristian nations and were early accepted by our own king Alfred1as the basis of the law system of this our land.
We live in an age of devotion to comparative methods, when it isan article of faith to hold that the most fruitful means to attain aclear understanding of the exact nature of anything is to compare itwith its like. This comparative method forms a large part ofmodern scientific research and, with proper safeguards and reserves,has become a favourite weapon of literary research into the history ofhuman institutions.
Long ago, as it seems to us, Sir Henry Maine used it2 when hewrote his History of Early Law. As a consequence of his investigationsand those of many who have followed in his footsteps, the Science ofComparative Law has grown up. All the great law systems of theworld have been classified and compared, and comparative lawyers feltqualified to assign to any new-found fragment of ancient law its trueposition in their schemes. The results had rather confirmed thantraversed ancient claims for the supremacy of Mosaic Laws. Menhad settled down to the belief that we might compare, and that to itsgreat advantage, the Legislation of Moses with the Roman Laws ofthe XII Tables, with the Indian Laws of Manu or the Greek Codeof Gortyna. We had recognized the broad outlines of a process ofevolution and begun to understand the way in which, as a peopleadvanced along the path of progress in the elements of civilization,similar human needs called forth similar solutions of the questions ofright and wrong.
Nevertheless much remained obscure in many ancient legislations.It was the opinion of Jhering,3 the great authority on Roman Law,that for the ultimate solution of the puzzles of Roman Law we shouldhave to go back to Babylon. In his days comparatively little wasknown about the laws of Babylonia, and that little was badly attested.Men were still of opinion that the Mosaic Law was the oldest of which[Pg iv]we had any trustworthy account and that Babylonian laws, if thereever were any worthy of the name, must have been more barbarousand unformed.
Then there came, in the early days of this century, a great surprise,calling at once for much revision of our neatly arranged systemsof knowledge. A Code of Laws was discovered, certainly the oldestknown, by far the most complete and best attested, and at the sametime the most advanced of all but the most modern.
Fragments of it were al