Via Positive Liberty, “Christian Influences on the Law“:
“In other words, liberty (and I should note ‘equality’ too) of conscience for the believer and heretic alike required a purge of the sacred aspects of the Christian religion from the law, leaving behind the secular. And we are better off for it.”
This is an interesting read.
On the other hand, as I have just read part of the source article, this seems to point to the loss of the sacred as the root for a metaphysical horror leading to ethical cynicism in the law. It’s interesting that the taint of social darwinism, here only called an “amoral, Darwinian struggle” is taken as the result of de-sacralizing the Law.