These fifteen essays by the editor of the Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion, adapted and excerpted from previous publications, are grouped around human rights, American history and the family. The title derives from a remark of Luther's, and the essays are written from a mainly Protestant point of view, ‘searching within the wisdom of ages for some indication of the eternal wisdom of God’. Legal rights discourse is traced through various revolutions from Rome to the modern world, with emphasis on religious freedom and the restrictions to which it is still subject, for example in Russia. The history of the First Amendment, and its impact on the separation of Church and State, is meticulously traced. Witte argues for understanding its constitutional formulation in a spirit closer to that of Adams's ‘tempered religious freedom’, than Jefferson's ‘wall of separation between church and state’. Marriage is more than a contract and there is a case for allowing parties to choose between contract marriage, readily dissoluble, and a stricter version, such as the legislative option called covenant marriage in some southern states. The essays are broadly balanced and well documented. But a Romanist may be permitted to remark that our understanding of the historical cross-fertilisation of law and religion would benefit from an appreciation of an important difference between western-influenced law and the law of religious systems such as the Judaic or Islamic. The latter ethnically-derived systems of law incorporate religious obligations towards God, while mature Roman civil law and the derived systems, including the Anglo-American, were and remain secular. Christianity influenced but never supplanted the existing civil law of the Roman empire. It constituted rather an alternative society, which adopted many of the norms of the civil society in which it emerged. This has remained its role in relation to modern state systems and to international law, which rest on networks of reciprocal rights and obligations – not a conceivable basis for a primarily religious legal system. What is now regarded as the separation of Church and State was therefore inherent from the beginning in the system that first embraced Christianity. Of course outside influences on law-making and legal practice, moral, religious, economic or purely conventional, remain of great and shifting importance. But the commitment involved in the mere fact of having a western-type legal system, with its network of rights and obligations, is fairly modest. There must be a commitment to co-operation between the members of a society, and to co-ordination between societies. The members must be treated as of equal dignity, and within limits free to decide for themselves. Within this broad framework, however, the ideological input can be quite various. Witte sees this perhaps more in his analysis of recent relations between law and religion than in his account of its origins.