EARLY ROMAN RELIGION. 



THERE seems to be an ever increasing interest taken in the 

 " juventus mundi," in the rude germs which have developed 

 to-day into such complex organisms. The ancient was accustomed 

 to look back to the past as better than the present, to refer the com- 

 plete expression of his ideals to a golden age which would never 

 come again. We moderns, however, go with magnifymg glass and 

 dissecting knife to the past, attempting to discover how our fore- 

 bears lived and thought, and ever present in our researches is the 

 question, how do these things throw light on ourselves; to what 

 extent can we trace a continuity of process between the past and the 

 present? 



In no region of knowledge has this interest been more marked 

 than in the study of religious belief. Such a historical study starts 

 with the very crude ideas of the savage about those elements in the 

 world around him which he cannot understand and to which— with 

 the religious consciousness in its very rudest germ — he ascribes 

 supernatural powers. Following this course of inquiry through the 

 ages, we discover the vast complexity of modern religion, whether 

 we take its ritual and ceremonial, its belief about the Deity, its doc- 

 trines or, in general, the religious consciousness. 



Any attempt, then, to study religion in one of its early forms, 

 possesses attractions of various kinds. In the first place we meet 

 with religion near its beginnings, retaining much of its simplicity of 

 conception and ritual, enabling us to see how primitive man put his 

 first religious instincts into conscious practice, what form his feeling 

 of something higher than himself naturally took. Secondly, we can 

 attempt from a study of the conditions of his early history to show 

 how those very conditions were instrumental in forming a religious 

 belief of a particular kind, how, in other words, at this stage of re- 

 ligious development religion was not essentially a relation between 

 the creature and the Creator quite undisturbed by the needs of the 

 material world, but was conditioned by his physical wants and his 

 surroundings. Thirdly, religion has passed through stages of nar- 

 rower limitations before it has reached that of universality, of ap- 

 peal to men irrespective of colour and nationality ; it had first to be 

 tribal and at a higher stage national ; in fact religion even in its 



