reater contract with
higher powers--the feeling that the gods did regard and reward exact
fulfilment of duty--cannot have been without re-action on the relations
of the life of the community: it was, as it were, a higher sanction to
the legal point of view: a pledge that the relations of citizen and
state too were rightly conceived. 'There is,' says Cicero, speaking of
the death of Clodius in the language of a later age, 'there is a divine
power which inspired that criminal to his own ruin: it was not by
chance that he expired before the shrine of the Bona Dea, whose rites
he had violated': the divine justice is the sanction of the human law.
Even in the fear, from which all ultimately sprang, there was a
training in self-repression and self-subordination, which in a more
civilised age must result in a valuable respect and obedience. The
descendants of those who had made religion out of an attempt to appease
the hostile _numina_, feeling themselves not indeed on more familiar
terms with their 'unknown gods,' but only perhaps a little more
confident of their own strength, were not likely to be wanting in a
disciplined sense of dependence and an appreciation of the value of
respect for authority, which alone can give stability to a
constitution. If fear with the Romans was not the beginning of
theological wisdom, it was yet an important contribution to the
character of a disciplined state.

But, as I have hinted in the course of this sketch more than once, the
answer to this problem, as well as the key to the general understanding
of the Roman religion, is to be found in the worship of the household.
If we knew more of it, we should see more clearly where religion and
morality joined hands, but we know enough to give us a clue. There not
only are the principal events of life, birth, adolescence, marriage,
attended by their religious sanction, but in the ordinary course of the
daily round the divine presence and the dependence of man are
continually emphasised. The gods are given their portion of the family
meal, the sanctified dead are recalled to take their share of the
family blessings. The result was not merely an approach--collectively,
not individually--to that sense of the nearness of the unseen, which
has so great an effect on the actions of the living, but a very strong
bond of family union which lay at the root of the life of the state.
It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the notion than
in the