lls of new experience by formalising the old
religion still more completely in the name of the State, until it became
a mere skeleton of dry bones, without life and power. That will bring us
to the great turning-point in Roman history, the war with Hannibal, to
the religious history of which I shall devote my fourth lecture; and the
fifth will pursue the subject into the century that followed. In the
next lecture I hope to sketch the influence on Roman religious ideas of
the Stoic school of philosophy, and in the seventh to discuss, so far as
I may be able, the tendency towards mysticism prevalent in the last
period of the life of the Republic. My eighth lecture I intend to devote
to the noble attempt of Virgil to combine religion, legend, philosophy,
and consummate art in a splendid appeal to the conscience of the Roman
of that day. Then I turn to the more practical attempt of Augustus to
revive the dying embers of the old religion; and in my last lecture I
shall try to estimate the contribution, such as it was, of the religious
experience we have been discussing, to the early Christian church.

We shall shortly hear so much of petrifaction and disintegration, that
it may be as well, before I actually begin my story, to convince
ourselves that the old religion was in its peculiar way a real
expression of religious feeling, and not merely a set of meaningless
conventions and formulae. It was the positive belief of the later Romans
that both they and their ancestors were _religiosissimi mortales_,[510]
full to the brim, that is, of religious instinct, and most scrupulous in
fulfilling its claims upon them; for the word _religio_ had come, by the
time (and probably long before the time) when it was used by men of
letters, to mean the fulfilment of ritualistic obligation quite as much
as the anxious feeling which had originally suggested it.[511] Cicero,
writing in no rhetorical mood, declared that, as compared with other
peoples, the Romans were far superior "in religione, id est cultu."[512]
This is in his work on the nature of the gods; in an oration he
naturally puts it more strongly: "We have overcome all the nations of
the world, because we have realised that the world is directed and
governed by the will of the gods."[513] Sallust, Livy, and other Roman
prose writers have said much the same thing[514]; the _Aeneid_ as a
whole might be adduced as evidence, and in a less degree all the poets
of the Augustan age. Foreig