ased
to flow through the Mysteries, and the stones are accepted
literally, and there is nothing else to maintain the inner life
of the people,--a Teacher of some kind must come to state things
in plainer terms. This, I take it, is what happened here; and
the very worn-outness of conditions that this implies, implies
also tremendous cultural and imperial activities in forgotten
time; I imagine Italy, then, at two or three thousand B.C.,
was playing a part as much greater outwardly than Greece
was, as her part now is greater than Greece's, and has been
during recent centuries.

This, then, is what Numa's religion did for Rome:--it peopled the
woods and fields and hills with these impersonal divinities; it
peopled the moments of the day with them; so that nothing in
space or time, no near familiar thing or duty, was material
wholly, or pertained to this world alone;--there was another side
to it, connected with the unseen and the gods. There were Great
Gods in the Pantheon; but your early Roman had no wide-traveling
imagination; and they seemed to him remote and uncongenial
rather,--and quickly took on Greekishness when the Greek
influence began. Minerva, vaguely imagined, assumed soon the
attributes of the very concretely imagined Pallas; and so on.
But he had nearer and Numaish divinities much more a part of his
life,--which indeed largely consisted of rituals in their honor.
There were Lares and Penates and Manes, who made his home a kind
of temple, and the earth a kind of altar; there were deities
presiding over all homely things and occasions; formless
impersonal deities; presences to be felt and remembered, not
clothed imaginatively with features and myths:--Cuba, who gave
the new-born child its first breath; Anna Perenna of the
recurring year; hosts of agricultural gods without much
definition, and the unseen genii of wood, field, and mountain.
Everything, even each individual man, had a god-side: there was
something in it or him greater, more subtle, more enduring, than
the personality or outward show.--To the folk-lorist, of course,
it is all 'primitive Mediterranean' religion or superstition;
but the inner worlds are wonderful and vast, if you begin to have
the smallest inkling of an understanding of them. I think
we may recognise in all this the hand of a wise old Pompilius
from the Sabine hills, at work to keep the life of his Romans,
peasant-bandits as they were, clean in the main and sound. Yes,
th