Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of practical experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested it through the intellect of chosen and enlightened men. The Roman distinction between _jus_ and _fas_ (such as it was, for the content even of _fas_ had proceeded from human reflection) became meaningless. The law, of whatever kind, spiritual or secular, came into being, as stated in the first words of Justinian’s Digests, _Deo auctore_. The authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that of the Arabian on the majesty of the name that they bear.[103] But it matters very considerably indeed in a man’s feelings whether he regards law as an expression of some fellow man’s will or as an element of the divine dispensation. In the one case he either sees for himself that the law is right or else yields to force, but in the other he devoutly acknowledges (“_Islam_” = to commit, devote). The Oriental does not ask to see either the practical object of the law that is applied to him or the logical grounds of its judgments. The relation of the cadi to the people, therefore, has nothing in common with that of the prætor to the citizens. The latter bases his decisions upon an insight trained and tested in high positions, the former upon a spirit that is effective and immanent in him and speaks through his mouth. But it follows from this that their respective relations to written law--the prætor’s to his edict, the cadi’s to the jurists’ texts--must be entirely different. It is a quintessence of concentrated experience that the prætor makes his own, but the texts are a sort of oracle that the cadi esoterically questions. It does not matter in the least to the cadi what a passage originally meant or why it was framed. He consults the words--_even the letters_--and he does so not at all for their everyday meanings, but for the _magic_ relations in which they must stand towards the case before him. We know this relation of the “spirit” to the “letter” from the Gnosis, from the early-Christian, Jewish, and Persian apocalyptic and mystical literature, from the Neopythagorean philosophy, from the Kabbalah; and there is not the slightest doubt that the Latin codices were used in exactly the same way in the minor judicial practice of the Aramæan world. The conviction that the letters contain secret meanings, penetrated with the Spirit of God, finds imaginative expression in the fact (mentioned above) that all religions of the Arabian world formed scripts of their own, in which the holy books had to be written and which maintained themselves with astounding tenacity as badges of the respective “nations” even after changes of language.[104]