It is only in the higher
stages of civilisation that this desire can really become effective;
social organisation, as I shall show, produces an increased knowledge of
the nature of the Power, and with it a systematisation of the means
deemed necessary to secure the right relations. The City-state, the
peculiar form in which Greek and Italian social and political life
eventually blossomed and fructified, was admirably fitted to secure this
effectiveness. It was, of course, an intensely _local_ system; and the
result was, first, that the Power is localised in certain spots and
propitiated by certain forms of cult within the city wall, thus bringing
the divine into closest touch with the human population and its
interests; and secondly, that the concentration of intelligence and
will-power within a small space might, and did at Rome, develop a very
elaborate system for securing the right relations--in other words, it
produced a religious system as highly ritualistic as that of the Jews.

With the several aspects of this system my fifth and succeeding lectures
will be occupied. I shall deal first with the religious calendar of the
earliest historical form of the City-state, which most fortunately has
come down to us entire. I shall devote two lectures to the early Roman
ideas of divinity, and the character of their deities as reflected in
the calendar, and as further explained by Roman and Greek writers of the
literary age. Two other lectures will discuss the ritual of sacrifice
and prayer, with the priests in charge of these ceremonies, and the
ritual of vows and of "purification." In each of these I shall try to
point out wherein the weakness of this religious system lay--viz. in
attempts at effectiveness so elaborate that they overshot their mark, in
a misconception of the means necessary to secure the right relations,
and in a failure to grow in knowledge of the Power itself.

Lastly, as the City-state advances socially and politically, in trade
and commerce, in alliance and conquest, we shall find that the ideas of
other peoples about the Power, and their methods of propitiation, begin
to be adopted in addition to the native stock. The first stages of this
revolution will bring us to the conclusion of my present course; but we
shall be then well prepared for what follows. For later on we shall find
the Romans feeling afresh the desire to be in right relation with the
Power, discovering that their own highly formalised