ost national form of divinity in Italy. But while
abstraction, which lies at the foundation of every religion, elsewhere
endeavoured to rise to wider and more enlarged conceptions and to
penetrate ever more deeply into the essence of things, the forms
of the Roman faith remained at, or sank to, a singularly low level
of conception and of insight. While in the case of the Greek
every influential motive speedily expanded into a group of forms
and gathered around it a circle of legends and ideas, in the case
of the Roman the fundamental thought remained stationary in its
original naked rigidity. The religion of Rome had nothing of its
own presenting even a remote resemblance to the religion of Apollo
investing earthly morality with a halo of glory, to the divine
intoxication of Dionysus, or to the Chthonian and mystical worships
with their profound and hidden meanings. It had indeed its "bad
god" (-Ve-diovis-), its apparitions and ghosts (-lemures-), and
afterwards its deities of foul air, of fever, of diseases, perhaps even
of theft (-laverna-); but it was unable to excite that mysterious
awe after which the human heart has always a longing, or thoroughly
to embody the incomprehensible and even the malignant elements
in nature and in man, which must not be wanting in religion if it
would reflect man as a whole. In the religion of Rome there was
hardly anything secret except possibly the names of the gods of
the city, the Penates; the real character, moreover, even of these
gods was manifest to every one.

The national Roman theology sought on all hands to form distinct
conceptions of important phenomena and qualities, to express them
in its terminology, and to classify them systematically--in the
first instance, according to that division of persons and things
which also formed the basis of private law--that it might thus be
able in due fashion to invoke the gods individually or by classes,
and to point out (-indigitare-) to the multitude the modes of
appropriate invocation. Of such notions, the products of outward
abstraction--of the homeliest simplicity, sometimes venerable,
sometimes ridiculous--Roman theology was in substance made up.
Conceptions such as sowing (-saeturnus-) and field-labour (-ops-)
ground (-tellus-) and boundary-stone (-terminus-), were among
the oldest and most sacred of Roman divinities. Perhaps the most
peculiar of all the forms of deity in Rome, and probably the only
one for whose worshi