3o RENAISSANCES these Iconodules, any more than it would have occurred to their Icnno- clast bugbears, to look for the sanction of Law in autonomous at'tn of human volition. As a matter of historical fact, the Roman J ,:iw, whose champions the Macedonian Emperors professed to be, had bcrn the n-made product of a well-documented series of legislative acts 6________ legislative power. legal history, the Macedonians showed themselves true Orthodox t'hrin tians in displaying a veritably 'Isaurian' inability to imagine that any law could be validated by any other sanction than the onlimmee of a God who had 'given Man a good law to salvage und blend and pre- serve' a Human Nature in which the polar and antithetical elements of spirit and matter had been combined and compounded by the Creator,1 In other words, 'the salutary law' which the Macedonians were vindicat- ing against the Iconoclasts was founded, in the Macedonians*1 belief likewise, on 'the divine dogma', and their quarrel with these Syrian pre- decessors of theirs was a family quarrel in which the opposing theses that were championed with so much zeal and bitterness by their respective, advocates were two closely related variants of one identical Orthodox Christian creed. The plot of a legal drama in which a Christian new departure wu» dogged by the successively raised ghosts of Moses und Justinian can be seen likewise working itself out on a Western stage on which Leo Syrus's role was played by Charlemagne* 'The Carolingian legislation . ., marks the emergenee of the tu-w «m'iul consciousness of Western Christendom, Hitherto the ItWMlutitm of the Western kingdoms had been of the nature of a Chrintian uppendm tn the, old barbarian tribal codes. Now, for the first tinu*» u complete bivuk wiw made with the Past, and Christendom enacted its own lawn, which covered the whole field of social activity in Church and State and referred nil things to the single standard of the Christian Othtw. Thw wiw MHpifcd neither by Germanic nor [by] Roman precedent.** In Western, as in Orthodox, Christendom, however, the ghaut of Moses trod hard on the Apostles' and Evangelists' hcelti, 'The Carolinian Emperors gave the Itiw to the whole Chrixtmn people in the spirit of the kings and judges of the Old Timtument, declaring the Law of God to the people of God, In the letter which Cuthtutlf ntidmmrti to Charles at the beginning of his reign, the writer *pe»k* of the kin« «* the earthly representative of God, and h* cnun«el» Chnrle* to mv the Book of Divine Law as his manual of government, according t« the pre- cept of Deuteronomy xvii. 18-30, which commands the Kim* to make ft copy of the Law from the books of the prietta, to keep it «dw»y» with him, and to read it constantly, so that he may learn to ft'ar the Lord and keep ~'A "* "ti " ~C~~ """ ~" "rr ","" ,' Jr~ ••—• "l—i>«r»r- n«.*vr»w1m>*riir 1