, religious games were
instituted to carry the Roman mind back to the sacred past. Livy and
Virgil treated the past from a religious point of view, showing the
sacred mission of the Roman race, and exhibiting the valour and piety
of the founders of the state. If the Roman religion could be revived
these were the proper means to do it. But the religion of the future
was not to be prepared in this way.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

The sections on religion in Mommsen's _History of Rome_.

Ramsay's _Roman Antiquities_.

Wissowa, _Religion und Cultur der Roemer_.

Holwerda, in De la Saussaye.

For the period of the Empire, Boissier's _La Religion Romaine_.

See also the work of Cumont, cited at the end of chapter x.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA

I. _The Vedic Religion_

No contrast could well be greater than that between the German
religion and that of India. In the one case we have a people full of
vigour, but not yet civilised; in the other a people of high
organisation and culture, but deficient in vigour; the former
religion is one of action, the latter one of speculation. From the
original Aryan faith, to which that of the Teutons most closely
approximates, Indian religion is removed by two great steps. First we
have as a variety of Aryan faith the Indo-Iranian religion, that of
the undivided ancestors of Persians and Indians alike, in the dim
period antecedent to the Aryan settlement of India. Of this religion,
the common mother of those of Persia and of India, we shall give some
sketch after we have made acquaintance with the gods of India, at the
beginning of our Persian chapter. Indian religion is a variety of
Indo-Iranian, which is a variety of the Aryan type. Neither its
genealogy nor its character entitles it to be taken as a typical
example of the Aryan religions. In literary chronology it is the
earliest of them, inasmuch as its books are the oldest sacred
literature of Aryan faith; but in point of development it is not an
early but an advanced product. The absorbing interest it offers to
the student of our science is due to the fact that it presents in an
unbroken sequence a growth of religious thought, which, beginning
with simple conceptions and advancing to a great priestly ritual, can
be seen to pass into mysticism and asceticism, and thence to the
rejection of all gods and rites, and a system of salvation by
individual good conduct. Nowhere else can the progress of religion
throug