anything of the nature of an ultimate command. Transcending all customs, and supreme over all enactments, rose the sovereign majesty of natural law, which is one and indivisible, and runs through all creation. 'All custom,' writes Gratian, the great canonist, 'and all written law, that are adverse to natural law, are to be counted null and void.' Here, in this conception of a natural law upholding all creation, we may find once more a Stoic legacy to the Christian Church. 'Men ought not to live in separate cities, distinguished one from another by different systems of justice'--so Zeno the Stoic had taught--'but there should be one way and order of life, like that of a single flock feeding on a common pasture.' Zeno, like St. Paul, came from Cilicia.[20] Like St. Paul, he taught the doctrine of the one society, in which there was neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Greek nor barbarian. We shall not do wrong to recognize in his teaching, and in that of his school, one of the greatest influences, outside the supreme and controlling influence of the Christian principle itself, which made for the dominance of the idea of unity in mediaeval thought. Before we proceed to draw another negative conclusion from the principle of the one community, we must enter a brief caveat in regard to the conclusion which has just been drawn. We cannot altogether take away the State from the Middle Ages by a stroke of the pen and the sweep of a paradox. There were states in mediaeval Europe, and there were kings who claimed and exercised _imperium_. These things caused the theorists, and particularly the Roman lawyers, no little trouble. It was difficult to reconcile the unity of the _imperium_ with the multiplicity of kings. Some had recourse to the theory of delegation, and this seems to be the theory of the _De Monarchia_ of Dante. But there was one contemporary of Dante who said a wise thing, prophetic of the future. _Rex est in regno suo_, wrote Bartolus of Sassoferrato, _imperator regni sui_. In that sentence we may hear the cracking of the Middle Ages. When kings become 'entire emperors of their realms' (the phrase was used in England by Richard II, and the imperial style was affected by Henry VIII), unity soon prepares to fly out of the window. But she never entirely took flight until the Reformation shattered the fabric of the Church, and made kings into popes as well as emperors in their dominions.