right
wording, and if the ritual accompanying it is equally in order. The
faith is, indeed, thus founded upon man's devices rather than the god's
good-will as such; it is a belief in the State and its authorities and
_ius divinum_, which is conceived, not indeed as constraining the deity,
but as calling upon him (_invocare_) to perform his part, in formulae
which he cannot well neglect, simply because it would be unreasonable
to do so, contrary to his nature as a deity of the Roman State and its
_ager_.

It is obvious in all this sacrificial ritual that the officiating person
or persons were expected to observe the traditional forms with the
utmost care and exactness. Any slip or omission was, in fact, a
_piaculum_, or _sacrum commissum_--terms of the _ius divinum_ which seem
to suggest, if I may use the expression, the obverse side of holiness.
It is now well known that cleanness and uncleanness, holiness and its
opposite, can be expressed in religious vocabulary by the same terms,
for in both cases there is something beyond the ordinary, something
dangerous, uncanny; thus we are not surprised to find that such words as
I have just mentioned can be used to express some kind of impurity
caused by a breach of ritual as well as that ritual itself. If we accept
the latest theory of sacrifice, _i.e._ the dynamic theory, as it is
called, we explain this intense nervousness about a ritualistic flaw as
occasioned by the consciousness of a breach in the current of "religious
force" (the expression is that of Messrs. Hubert and Mauss[399]), which
must pass in regular sequence from the sacrificer through the victim to
the deity, or vice versa. If this is the true explanation--and at
present it may be said to hold the field--then the extreme exactness of
the Roman ritual was a survival from an age when this strange feeling
was a reality; but no more than a survival, for, so far as I can
discover, the Roman idea was rather that the deity to whom the ritual
was addressed was in some way offended by the omission.[400] The dynamic
notion is lost, if it ever were there, and its place has been taken by
one that we may perhaps call theological. But however that may be, the
culprit was regarded as in a state of sin or impurity, "un etre sacre,"
and had to get rid of this sin or impurity by another sacrifice before
the whole ritual could be started afresh (_instaurare_).

According to the "dynamic" theory of sacrifice, we might naturally