eousness. This is religion in a high state of
development; but our definition is so skilfully worded as to adapt
itself readily to much earlier and simpler forms. The "Power manifesting
itself in the universe" may be taken as including all the workings of
nature, which even now we most imperfectly understand, and which
primitive man so little understood that he misinterpreted them in a
hundred different ways. The effective desire to be in right relation
with these mysterious powers, so that they might not interfere with his
material well-being--with his flocks and herds, with his crops, too, if
he were in the agricultural stage, with his dwelling and his land, or
with his city if he had got so far in social development--this is what
we may call the religious instinct, the origin of what the Romans called
_religio_.[8] The effective desire to have your own will brought into
conformity to the will of a heavenly Father is a later development of
the same feeling; to this the genuine Roman never attained, and the
Greek very imperfectly.

If we keep this definition steadily in mind, I think we shall find it a
valuable guide in following out what I call the religious experience of
the Roman people; and at the present moment it will help me to explain
my plan in drawing up these lectures. To begin with, in the prehistoric
age of Rome, so far as we can discern from survivals of a later age, 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