hools were closed. The Senate
did not sit.

Thus religion everywhere met the public life of the Roman by its
festivals, and laid an equal yoke on his private life by its requisition
of sacrifices, prayers, and auguries. All pursuits must be conducted
according to a system, carefully laid down by the College of Pontiffs.
Sacrifices and prayers of one or another kind were demanded during most of
the occasions of life. Hidden in our word "inaugurate" is the record of
the fact that nothing could be properly begun without the assistance of
the augurs. Sacrifices of lustration and expiation were very common, not
so much for moral offences as for ceremonial mistakes. The doctrine of the
_opus operatum_ was supreme in Roman religion. The intention was of little
importance; the question was whether the ceremony had been performed
exactly in accordance with rule. If not, it must be done again. Sometimes
fifty or a hundred victims were killed before the priestly etiquette was
contented. Sometimes magistrates must resign because the college of augurs
suspected some informality in the ceremonies of their election. Laws were
annulled and judicial proceedings revoked for the same reason. If the
augurs declared the signs unfavorable, a public meeting must be adjourned
and no business done. A single mistake in the form of a prayer would make
it ineffectual. If a man went out to walk, there was a form to be recited;
if he mounted his chariot, another. All these religious acts were of the
nature of _charms_, which acted on the gods by an inherent power, and
compelled them to be favorable, whatever their own wishes might be. The
gods were, therefore, as much the slaves of external mechanical laws as
the Romans themselves. In reality, the supreme god of Rome was law, in the
form of rule. But these rules afterward expanded, as the Roman
civilization increased, into a more generous jurisprudence. Regularity
broadened into justice.[289] But for a long period the whole of the Roman
organic law was a system of hard external method. And the rise of law as
justice and reason was the decline of religion as mere prescription and
rule. This one change is the key to the dissolution of the Roman system of
religious practices.

The seat of Roman worship in the oldest times was the Regia in the Via
Sacra, near the Forum. This was the house of the chief pontiff, and here
the sacrifices were performed[290] by the Rex Sacrorum. Near by was the
temp