Maine,[1] “of early commonwealths, that their citizens considered all the groups in which they claimed membership to be founded on common lineage.” “The history of political ideas,” says the same writer, “begins in fact with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions; nor is there any of those subversions of feeling which we emphatically term revolutions, so startling and so complete as the change which is accomplished when some other principle—such as that, for instance, of local contiguity—establishes itself for the first time as the basis of common political action.” The revolution of which Professor Maine here speaks was effected both at Rome and at Athens by struggles between the men of the privileged lineage and those who were strangers to it, which shook the Commonwealth to its centre: and the family rites, from their hereditary character, were a stronghold of exclusion, and made religion a source of division and injustice in the State.
Among the Hebrews, the rite of circumcision administered to all alike, and the participation of the whole household in the family rite of the Passover, combined with the law requiring the presence of all males at the solemn seasons before the Lord, effectually incorporated even the foreign slave into the community, without doing violence to the ideas on which, at that period, society was necessarily based.
The fitness of the Passover especially for this great
- ↑ Ancient Law, p. 129.
