conception which the Christian Fathers later held of the condition of man before the Fall, before sin came into the world, and has been transmitted by them to us. To return now to the doctrine of the natural equality of men and to the belief that the universal capacity for the exercise of political authority should find adequate expression, out of these principles grew the doctrine which Roman lawyers from the second to the sixth century have noted here and there in the _Codes_, that the power which a government exercises is derived from the people. This source of authority the emperors recognized in the _Codes_ up to the time of Justinian. As the Carlyles have shown, this doctrine was accepted by the lawyers in the Middle Ages. It applies to judicial authority, as Bulgarus of Bologna teaches in the twelfth century, and to legislative power, as Irnerius of the same century holds. Their arguments come from the Roman period, because they are drawn from the _Corpus Iuris Civilis_, and they borrow phrases from the _Digest_ and the _Code_. The question naturally arose in their minds whether the people could resume their authority or not. Scholars were divided on this point. Some of them maintained that the popular will still found expression in custom, and that therefore custom could override law. Most of them believed that universal custom had this power, but that local custom did not. Consequently they held that the sovereignty of the people still found expression in custom. In passing we may note that we have here the distinction between “unwritten” and “written” law or between common law and statute law. The theory that the authority in the state emanated from the people continued to be the prevailing doctrine as late as the middle of the thirteenth century, as the Carlyles have shown. It is maintained by Nicholas of Cues in the fifteenth century. In his _Systematic Politics, Confirmed by Examples from Sacred and Profane History_, published in 1610, the Calvinist, Johannes Althusius, carried the doctrine to its logical conclusion that, since the authority in a state rested on a contract between the people and their ruler, the people had the right to depose him and resume their delegated power. Hobbes in his _Leviathan_, which appeared in 1641, believed in the principle of the contract, but in his opinion the compact is made by the members of society with one another. The ruler does not enter into the covenant. Consequently he is not bound by it. The radical teachings of Althusius lay dormant for a century and a half, to be taken up by Rousseau in his _Contrat Social_ and to form the basis of the famous “Declaration of the Rights of Man” of 1789.