ld up a
great power. Living in an atmosphere of magic, where unseen dangers
lurk on every side, and there is virtue in words and forms correctly
used to avert these dangers, the Roman develops to perfection one
side of religion. To its inspirations and enthusiasms and hidden
consolation he is a stranger; but he knows it better than others as a
conservative and regulating force, which checks passion, calls for
wary and orderly conduct, and causes the individual to subordinate
himself to the community.

Changes introduced from without.--The Roman religion had, properly
speaking, no development. What it might have become had it been left
to unfold itself without interference from without, we can only
guess; but it was early brought under the influence of more highly
developed religions, and it proved to have so little power of
resisting innovations that it speedily parted with much of its own
native character. The Romans were not unconscious that their religion
was an imperfect one; they never claimed, when they were conquering
the world, that their religion was the only true one, or had any
mission to prevail over others. They were tolerant from the first of
the religions of other peoples. The gods of other peoples they always
believed to be real beings, with whom it was well for them also to be
on good terms. If everything in the world had its spirit, these gods
also were the spirits of their own countries and nations; the very
notion of deity which the Romans entertained prevented them from
having any exclusive belief in their own gods or from denying the
right of the gods of others.[2] When therefore they came in contact
with foreign religions, they were not protected by any profound
conviction of the truth of their own, and were exposed to the full
force of the new ideas. The new religions came to them along with the
culture of peoples much further advanced in art and in thought than
they were themselves; at each such contact, therefore, they felt the
foreigner to be superior to themselves in intellectual matters; and
wherever this happens, the less highly gifted race is likely to
change in its religion as well as in other things. We have to note
the changes which were produced by such external influences.

[Footnote 2: Cf. Celsus in Origen, _Contra Celsum_, vii. 68.]

In the first place, Rome borrowed from Etruria. Etruscan religion was
both more developed and more savage than that of Rome. Human
sacrifice was an