rds which we have
so often dwelt on in the course of these lectures, and gave them new but
almost equally clear and pregnant meanings. Let us glance at three or
four of these; for such a legacy as this is no mean property of the
Christian religion of the West.

Let us take, to begin with, the greatest of all these words--_religio_.
I have maintained throughout these lectures that the original sense of
this word was the natural feeling of man in the presence of the
supernatural; and though this has actually been questioned since I began
them,[967] I see no good reason to alter my conviction. But in the age
of Cicero and Lucretius the word begins to take on a different meaning,
of great importance for the future. Though Cicero as a young man had
defined _religio_ as "the feeling of the presence of a higher or divine
nature, which prompts man to worship,--to _cura et caerimonia_,"[968]
yet later on in life he uses it with much freedom of that _cura et
caerimonia_ apart from the feeling. To take a single example among many:
in a passage in his _de Legibus_ he says that to worship private or
strange or foreign gods, "confusionem habet religionum";[969] and again
he calls his own imaginary _ius divinum_ in that treatise a _constitutio
religionum_, a system of religious duties.[970] In many other passages,
on the other hand, we find both the feeling which prompts and the
cult-acts which follow on it equally connoted by the word; for example,
the phrase _religio sepulcrorum_ suggests quite as much the feeling as
the ritual. So it would seem that _religio_ is already beginning to pass
into the sense in which we still use it--_i.e._, _the feeling which
suggests worship, and the forms under which we perform that worship_. In
this broad sense it is also used by Lucretius, who included under it all
that was for him the world's evil and folly, both the feeling of awe
which he believed to be degrading, and the organised worship of the
family and the State, which he no less firmly believed to be futile.
"Tantum _religio_ potuit suadere malorum."[971] The fact is that in that
age, when the old local character of the cults was disappearing, and
when men like Posidonius, Varro, and Cicero were thinking and writing
about the nature of the gods and kindred subjects, a word was wanted to
gather up and express all this religious side of human life and
experience: it must be a word without a definite technical meaning, and
such a word was _rel