EARLY ROMAN RELIGION. 69 



Monotheism, even if we had some grounds to offer for this forget- 

 fulness, and of these there are none ; nor any practical utiUty in such 

 abbreviation. 



(3) Such a hypothesis leaves a most tremendous historical gap 

 between that stage of animism which is pastoral and which seems to 

 be the religion of the common Aryan stock and this advanced stage, 

 Monotheism. We may say that we lose sight of the Latin with the 

 scattering of that stock, wherever its original home, and wherever 

 the breaking up took place, and we are asked to believe that when 

 we next meet with those Latins they have in the interval, in the 

 course of their wanderings and under the rudest circumstances, even 

 before they rise to any settled mode of life, risen to a conception that 

 the Greeks in their most advanced stage never reached; and then 

 when we next meet with them, they have relapsed into Polytheism. 



Lastly, it seems to me that the attractiveness of such a theory 

 lies in the fact that it is an inversion of a truth. 



In this idea of a number of manifestations of power each inde- 

 pendent and separate, and none possessing any marked personality, 

 we can see from a later standpoint how the further idea is at least 

 latent, of these manifestations being those of one great power, how 

 from these particulars it is natural for man, in his attempt to explain 

 and co-ordinate, to arrive at the conception of a Unity underlying 

 and explaining the abstract particular he has started with. But as a 

 matter of fact the historical Roman never did this ; the development 

 of his religion was arrested long before he could achieve this ; and 

 when his ideas did change, it was not in the process of his own de- 

 velopment, but through the acceptance of Greek ideas. 



P. G. C. Campbell. 

 (To be continued) . 



