lways sufficiently realised, and that the
panorama of religious or quasi-religious practice from all parts of the
world, and found among peoples of very different stages of development,
with which we are now so familiar, needs constant testing by increased
knowledge of those peoples in all their relations of life. At any rate,
in dealing with Roman evidence the investigator of religious history
should also be a student of Roman history generally, for the facts of
Roman life, public and private, are all closely concatenated together,
and spring with an organic growth from the same root. The branches tend
to separate, but the tree is of regular growth, compact in all its
parts, and you cannot safely concentrate your attention on one of these
parts to the comparative neglect of the rest. Conversely, too, the great
story of the rise and decay of the Roman dominion cannot be properly
understood without following out the religious history of this
people--their religious experience, as I prefer to call it. To take an
example of this, let me remind you of two leading facts in Roman
history: first, the strength and tenacity of the family as a group under
the absolute government of the paterfamilias; secondly, the strength and
tenacity of the idea of the State as represented by the _imperium_ of
its magistrates. How different in these respects are the Romans from the
Celts, the Scandinavians, even from the Greeks! But these two facts are
in great measure the result of the religious ideas of the people, and,
on the other hand, they themselves react with astonishing force on the
fortunes of that religion.

I do not indeed wish to be understood as maintaining that the religion
of the Roman was the most important element in his mental or civic
development: far from it. I should be the first to concede that the
religious element in the Roman mind was not that part of it which has
left the deepest impress on history, or contributed much, except in
externals, to our modern ideas of the Divine and of worship. It is not,
as Roman law was, the one great contribution of the Roman genius to the
evolution of humanity. But Roman law and Roman religion sprang from the
same root; they were indeed in origin _one and the same thing_.
Religious law was a part of the _ius civile_, and both were originally
administered by the same authority, the Rex. Following the course of the
two side by side for a few centuries, we come upon an astonishing
phenome