and fasts observed, or on the other hand to the fulfilment of all that the tribe or the State expects from its citizens, are external duties. In most early nations, these duties are prescribed not by religious emotion, but by settled usages and rules which have the sanction alike of the State whose welfare is involved in their observance, and of the unseen Powers that protect it. The people have not yet begun to distinguish by analysis the three elements of Law, Morality and Devotion, though here and there the voices of lofty spirits, such as the prophets of Israel, are heard proclaiming the supremacy of the law of righteousness as the true expression of the Will of God, and obedience to it as the truest service that can be rendered by His creatures.

The relation borne by Law, Morality, and Worship, each to the other, differs widely in different peoples. The student of early society must be always on his guard, like the student of natural history, against expecting a greater uniformity than in fact exists, and against generalizing broadly from a few striking instances. Even so brilliant a speculator as Sir Henry Maine fell into the error of assuming the system of paternal power to be practically universal in certain stages of society. Among our Scandinavian and Low German ancestors, for example, it would appear (so far as our imperfect data go) that the worship of the gods had not very much to do with legal usages and civil polity, though to be sure other influences came in at a comparatively early stage to turn the current of their development 1. The same may be true of the Gadhelic tribes, though the knowledge we have regarding their usages and worship while still heathen is lamentably scanty. There is, however, in the records of early Rome and of the Greeks, as well as in those of some Eastern nations, a good deal to illustrate the view I have been trying to state.

1 But in Norway the Assembly is usually held at a temple, as in Iceland the Goði is both a priest and a chief, and the temple is the place where judicial oaths are taken. See Essay V.

A striking example of conditions of thought and practice in which religion had (at a comparatively advanced stage) been so involved in law as to be almost stifled by law is furnished by the Jewish people as we find them under Roman dominion. The lawyers referred to in the New Testament 1 (a class of whom there are but few traces before the Captivity) are not priests (though of course a priest might happen to be learned in the law), yet they have a quasi-sacerdotal position as conversant with and able to interpret a body of rules which are of divine origin, and embrace the relations of man to God as well as to his fellow men. Between religious duty and religious ceremony on the one hand and the performance of civil duties on the other there is no line of demarcation: all are of like obligation and are tried by similar canons. Hence piety tends to degenerate into formalism: hence the precisians who insist upon petty externalities and neglect the weightier duties deserve and incur the rebukes of a higher spiritual teaching. It may indeed be said that one great part of the work recorded in the Gospels, regarded on its historical side, was to disjoin Law from Religion or Religion from Law. And this work was performed not merely by superseding parts of the law known as that of Moses, or by giving a new sense to that law, but also by transforming Religion itself, purging away the externals of sacrifice and other ceremonial rights, and leading the renewed and purified soul into the glorious liberty of the people of God.'

That majority of the Jewish race which did not accept the teachings of Christ continued for many centuries, scattered and depressed as it was after the destruction. of Jerusalem, to treat its ancient law-books and the traditions which had gathered round them as being both a body of civil rules and a religious guide of life. De

1 The γραμματείς (scribes), νομικοί (lawyers), and νομοδιδάσκαλοι (doctors of the law) of the New Testament seem to be different names for the same class, and identical with the ἱερογραμματείς of Josephus.

spite the tendency to formalism which has been noted, there were among the Rabbis of the early centuries A.D. not a few who dwelt upon the moral and emotional side of the Mosaic Law, and who through it sustained the spirit of the sorely tried nation.

In the Christian Church also ceremonies and external observances came before long to play a great part in worship, and were for ages an essential element in the popular conception, indeed in the practically universal conception, of Christianity itself both as a theology and as a religion. The atmosphere which surrounded nascent Christianity was an atmosphere saturated with rites and observances. There were in the primitive Church some few usages and in the New Testament some few texts on which it was possible to erect a fabric of ceremonial worship. But even if these conditions had been absent, the tendencies of human nature to create a body of ritual and to attach a sort of legal sanction to the external duties which custom prescribed would have prevailed.

How far the rites and practices which nearly every branch of the Christian Church has to a greater or less extent enjoined are each of them interwoven with the vital tenets of the faith, is a question not likely to be settled in any future that we can foresee. But the conception of the Kingdom of the Heavens' as something dissevered from the obligations imposed by legal tradition has also remained ever since in Christianity as a principle of profound significance, which has at different times emerged in various forms to become sometimes a destroying, sometimes a vivifying and transforming force. Such sayings as Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,' or 'He hath made you kings and priests to God,' or ' Ye are not under the Law but under Grace,' have from time to time roused men to hold themselves delivered from all bonds of custom expounded or rules enforced by ecclesiastical authority. I will not, however, attempt to follow out the intricate

relations between the two conceptions, as they appear in the long course either of Christian or of Jewish annals, but will pass on to consider the phenomena of their connexion in another field, one in which the phenomena are comparatively simple, and lie open to-day to the study of every traveller in a land where the old and the new stand in striking contrast.

The best modern instance of the identity of Religion and Law is to be found in that originally misconceived and subsequently perverted form of Judaism which still prevails extensively over the eastern world, and recognizes Muhamad of Mecca as the last and greatest of the prophets of Jehovah. In Islam, Law is Religion and Religion is Law, because both have the same source and an equal authority, being both contained in the same divine revelation. I cannot better illustrate their union than by giving a short account of an ancient and splendid University where they are taught as one, hoping that so much of digression as is thereby involved will be pardoned in respect of the interest which this famous seat of learning deserves to excite, and of the light which it casts on the early history of the Universities of Europe —of Bologna and Paris, of Padua and Salamanca and Prague, and of our own Oxford and Cambridge.

About three hundred and fifty years after Muhamad, and towards the end of the tenth century of the Christian era, Johar, general of the Fatimite Sultans established at Tunis, conquered Egypt. When he built Cairo (El Kahira, the Victorious '), not far from the decayed Memphis, he founded in the new city a mosque which presently obtained the name of El Azhar, that is to say, The Flowers' or 'The Flourishing.' The Fatimites, belonging to the schismatic sect of the Shiites, were particularly anxious to establish their ecclesiastical position against the orthodox Sunnites, and, just as Protestant princes in the sixteenth century founded universities for the defence of their tenets-as, for instance, Elector John of Saxony set up the University of Jena

-so the second Fatimite ruler of Egypt, Khalif Aziz Billah, resolved to attract learned men to his capital.. He gathered famous teachers to the Mosque, and there was soon a great afflux of students. Sultan Hakim (probably a madman), who went so far beyond the doctrines of Shiism as to declare himself an incarnation of Ali and a Mahdi, closed El Azhar, and transferred the University to another mosque which he had founded. However, the teaching staff was subsequently brought back to El Azhar (which returned finally to Sunnite orthodoxy with the conquest of Egypt by Saladin in 1171 A.D.), and it has been now for many centuries the greatest University in the Musulman world, being situate in what has been, since the decline of Bagdad, the greatest purely Musulman city 1. The number of students sometimes reaches ten thousand; at the time of my visit (in 1888) it was estimated at eight thousand.

The whole teaching of the University is carried on within the walls of the Mosque, a large group of buildings, approached by six gates, and standing in the oldest part of Cairo. The chief entrance is from the Alley (or arcade) of the Booksellers in the Bazaar. At the outer portal, in the portico, the visitor leaves his shoes. To the left of the inner portal I found a noble square hall, said to date from the fourteenth century, as lofty as the chapel of Magdalen College and about as large, though different in shape, with beautiful marbles on the walls, and an aisle separated from the rest of the chamber by a row of tall columns, supporting slightly pointed arches. The sunlight came in through large openings, filled by no glass, under the roof. In the centre there were sitting or kneeling or crouching some eighty or ninety men in an irregular circle, mostly young men, yet many over thirty and some as old as fifty, with

1 Stambul (Constantinople) is larger, but Stambul has always had a large Christian element, whereas Cairo was till about thirty years ago almost wholly Muhamadan. Moreover Cairo was better situated for drawing students from North Africa and Western Asia than Stambul, which is almost on the outermost edge of the Musulman world.