“These are the dooms which Alfred the king chose, in order that no man should deem them otherwise than according to his will.” Such is the opening sentence of the laws. Then follows an elaborate table of contents including Ine’s laws as well as his own; and then, strangely enough, we have almost the whole of four chapters of the book of Exodus (xx.-xxiii.), containing the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic code of civil law in all its archaic simplicity and with all its Draconian sternness: the principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”; “whosoever doeth this or that he shall surely die,” the keynote of the whole. Then, however, comes a reference to the mission of “the Lord’s Son, our God, who is Jesus Christ, who came into the world, not to destroy the law but to fulfil it, and to increase it with all good things. With mild-heartedness and humility did He teach.” Thereupon follows a description of the Council of Jerusalem as given in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, and a rehearsal of its decrees about “abstaining from fornication, from things offered in sacrifice to idols, from things strangled and from blood”. The acts of this council end with the Golden Rule (omitted from the manuscripts on which the Received Text of the New Testament is founded, but inserted in _Codex Bezae_ and several early authorities), “And that which ye will that other men should not do to you, do not ye to other men”. “On this one doom,” says the king, “let each man meditate that he may judge each one rightly; nor needs he any other law-book. Let him seek for no other doom upon his neighbour than he would be willing to have pronounced upon himself.” But, as Alfred proceeds to show, since the conversion of many nations to Christianity, synods have been held at which bishops and other distinguished _witan_ have been present, and these assemblies, for the sake of the “mild-heartedness” which Christ taught, have commuted the death-penalty for the offences named in the Mosaic law to money payments on the scale set forth by them; and such payments may, therefore, without sin be taken by the secular lords to whom they are made payable. Only, there is one crime for which no money payment must be suffered to atone; and that is treason against a man’s rightful lord, because Almighty God ordained no remission of punishment to those who despised Himself, nor could His Son give any such remission to the traitor who delivered Him to death; and He ordered that a man should love his lord even as himself.