which they are sure to
blunder unless they have a thorough mastery of it. I could mention a
book full of valuable thoughts about the relation to Paganism of the
early Christian Church, by a scholar at once learned and sympathetic;[4]
who when he happens to deal for a moment with the old Roman religion, is
inaccurate and misleading at every point. He knew, for example, that
this religion is built on the foundation of the worship of the family,
but he yielded to the temptation to assume that the family in heaven was
a counterpart of the family on earth, "as it might be seen in any palace
of the Roman nobility." "Jupiter and Juno," he says, "were the lord and
lady, and beneath them was an army of officers, attendants, ministers,
of every rank and degree." Such a description of the pantheon of his
religion would have utterly puzzled a Roman, even in the later days of
theological syncretism. Again he says that this religion was strongly
moral; that "the gods gave every man his duty, and expected him to
perform it." Here again no Roman of historical times, or indeed of any
age, could have allowed this to be his creed. Had it really been so, not
only the history of the Roman religion, but that of the Roman state,
would have been very different from what it actually was.

The principles then on which I wish to proceed in these lectures
are--(1) to keep the subject in continual touch with Roman history and
the development of the Roman state; (2) to exercise all possible care
and accuracy in dealing with the technical matters of the religion
itself. I may now go on to explain more exactly the plan I propose to
follow.

It will greatly assist me in this explanation if I begin by making clear
what I understand, for our present purposes, by the word _religion_.
There have been many definitions propounded--more in recent years than
ever before, owing to the recognition of the study of religion as a
department of anthropology. Controversies are going on which call for
new definitions, and it is only by slow degrees that we are arriving at
any common understanding as to the real essential thing or fact for
which we should reserve this famous word, and other words closely
connected with it, _e.g._ the supernatural. We are still disputing, for
example, as to the relation of religion to magic, and therefore as to
the exact meaning to be attributed to each of these terms.

Among the many definitions of religion which I have met with, th