inder
is mainly concerned.

LECTURE II

ON THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION: SURVIVALS

My subject proper is the religion of an organised State: the religious
experience of a comparatively civilised people. But I wish, in the first
place, to do what has never yet been done by those who have written on
the Roman religion--I wish to take a survey of the relics, surviving in
later Roman practice and belief, of earlier stages of rudimentary
religious experience. In these days of anthropological and sociological
research, it is possible to do this without great difficulty; and if I
left it undone, our story of the development of religion at Rome would
be mutilated at the beginning. Also we should be at a disadvantage in
trying to realise the wonderful work done by the early authorities of
the State in eliminating from their rule of worship (_ius divinum_)
almost all that was magical, barbarous, or, as later Romans would have
called it, superstitious. This is a point on which I wish to lay
especial stress in the next few lectures, and it entails a somewhat
tiresome account of the ideas and practices of which, as I believe, they
sought to get rid. These, I may as well say at once, are to be found for
the most part surviving, as we might expect, _outside_ of the religion
of the State; where they survive within its limits, they will be found
to have almost entirely lost their original force and meaning.

Every student of religious history knows that a religious system is a
complex growth, far more complex than would appear at first sight; that
it is sure to contain relics of previous eras of human experience,
embedded in the social strata as lifeless fossils. These only indeed
survive because human nature is intensely conservative, especially in
religious matters; and of this conservative instinct the Romans afford
as striking an example as we can readily find. They clung with
extraordinary tenacity, all through their history, to old forms; they
seem to have had a kind of superstitious feeling that these dead forms
had still a value as such, though all the life was gone out of them. It
would be easy to illustrate this curious feature of the Roman mind from
the history of its religion; it never disappeared; and to this day the
Catholic church in Italy retains in a thinly-disguised form many of the
religious practices of the Roman people.

Stage after stage must have been passed by the Latins long before our
story right