The Religious Experience of the Roman People | Page 9

the
feeling or desire must have taken shape, ineffectively indeed, in many
quaint acts, some of them magical or quasi-magical, and possibly taken
over from an earlier and ruder population among whom the Latins
settled. Many of these continued, doubtless, to exist among the
common folk, unauthorised by any constituted power, while some few
were absorbed into the religious practice of the State, probably with the
speedy loss of their original significance. Such survivals of ineffective
religion are of course to be found in the lowest stratum of the religious
ideas of every people, ancient and modern; even among the Israelites,[9]
and in the rites of Islam or Christianity. They form, as it were, a kind of
protoplasm of religious vitality, from which an organic growth was
gradually developed. But though they are necessarily a matter of
investigation as survivals which have a story to tell, they do not carry
us very far when we are tracing the religious experience of a people,
and in any case the process of investigating them is one of groping in
the dark. I shall deal with these survivals in my next two lectures, and
then leave them for good.

I am more immediately concerned with the desire expressed in our
definition when it has become more effective; and this we find in the
Latins when they have attained to a complete settlement on the land,
and are well on in the agricultural stage of social development. This
stage we can dimly see reflected in the life of the home and farm of
later times; we have, I need hardly say, no contemporary evidence of it,
though archaeology may yet yield us something. But the conservatism
of rural life is a familiar fact, and comes home to me when I reflect that
in my own English village the main features of work and worship
remained the same through many centuries, until we were
revolutionised by the enclosure of the parish and the coming of the
railroad in the middle of the nineteenth century. The intense
conservatism of rural Italy, up to the present day, has always been an
acknowledged fact, and admits of easy explanation. We may be sure
that the Latin farmer, before the City-state was developed, was like his
descendants of historical times, the religious head of a family, whose
household deities were effectively worshipped by a regular and orderly
procedure, whose dead were cared for in like manner, and whose land
and stock were protected from malignant spirits by a boundary made
sacred by yearly rites of sacrifice and prayer. Doubtless these wild
spirits beyond his boundaries were a constant source of anxiety to him;
doubtless charms and spells and other survivals from the earlier stage
were in use to keep them from mischief; but these tend to become
exceptions in an orderly life of agricultural routine which we may call
religious. Spirits may accept domicile within the limits of the farm, and
tend, as always in this agricultural stage, to become fixed to the soil
and to take more definite shape as in some sense deities. This
stage--that of the agricultural family--is the foundation of Roman
civilised life, in religious as in all other aspects, and it will form the
subject of my fourth lecture.
The growing effectiveness of the desire, as seen in the family and in the
agricultural stage, prepares us for still greater effectiveness in the
higher form of civilisation which we know as that of the City-state.
That desire, let me say once more, is to be in right relations with the
Power manifesting itself in the universe. It is only in the higher stages
of civilisation that this desire can really become effective; social

organisation, as I shall show, produces an increased knowledge of the
nature of the Power, and with it a systematisation of the means deemed
necessary to secure the right relations. The City-state, the peculiar form
in which Greek and Italian social and political life eventually
blossomed and fructified, was admirably fitted to secure this
effectiveness. It was, of course, an intensely local system; and the
result was, first, that the Power is localised in certain spots and
propitiated by certain forms of cult within the city wall, thus bringing
the divine into closest touch with the human population and its interests;
and secondly, that the concentration of intelligence and will-power
within a small space might, and did at Rome, develop a very elaborate
system for securing the right relations--in other words, it produced a
religious system as highly ritualistic as that of the Jews.
With the several aspects of this system my fifth and succeeding lectures
will be occupied. I shall deal first with the religious calendar of the
earliest historical form of the City-state, which most fortunately has
come down to us