RELIGION OF ANCIENT ROME.

N dealing with so very large a subject as the Religion of Ancient Rome, I shall probably best use the short space at my disposal if, with as little comment as possible, I endeavour to set before you what the Romans believed and how they worshipped.

It was the deliberate opinion of their own greatest intellects, that they were the most religious people of their time, and that of all the forces which contributed to their greatness and which helped them to the mastery of the world, religion was the first. History so far confirms their verdict, and adds, that when they ceased to be religious they ceased to be great. Twenty-six centuries ago the foundations of Rome were laid with religious ceremonies and by religious men It is an evidence of the strength of the adoring principle in human nature, that to the influence which it still exerts as the headquarters of the most perfect of all religious organisations, it mainly owes its unrivalled position among the cities of the world. We never utter the word religion, which by common consent is universally employed as most accurately descriptive of the relations which bind man to God, without bearing unconscious evidence to the powerful in

fluence which their religion exerted, not only on the ancient Romans, but on all after-times.

The Roman religion was to a great extent a product of native Italian growth, and was coloured by the modes of life and thought which prevailed among the people whose spiritual conceptions it expressed. From the beginning they seem to have been a staid, sober, practical people, not much given to speculation, or to minute inquiry into the nature of their gods, whom all through their history they approached in set forms of worship, and for practical and definite ends. They had little or no creative power. There is hardly a trace among them of that legendary lore in which the other great branches of the Aryan family were so rich: the Greeks, for instance, and our own Celtic and Saxon forefathers. It was a high compensation that their religion was more spiritual than that of the Greeks, whose love for form, and for embodying their conceptions in form, inevitably led them to humanise their deities, and to regard them as merely colossal and not very exemplary men. The gods of the Romans seem all through to have floated in a finer ether, and to have breathed a purer air. Their relations to men were of a more spiritual kind. dom came to earth in person, or deigned to enter into personal converse with men. Their voice was heard in the winds and the waters, in the roll of the thunder, and in the roar of tempestuous nights. They spoke to man by signs and wonders; in the entrails of animals and in the flight of birds; in earthquake, lightning, and eclipse; in the mysterious moan of the windy forest; and in the hollow echo of the vaulted cave,—but rarely face to face, as a man speaketh with his friends.

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At the very foundation of their religion there lay two profound ideas rooted deep in every sound-hearted na

ture-that the spirit of man is in close and conscious relationship with the Spirit of God, and that underneath all phenomena there lies a supernatural element. The deeply reverent nature of the Roman, seeing God first in himself, came to see God in everything. The whole external universe was to him but the manifestation of the divine. While an immense Pantheon of Roman gods opens up to our view, the religion at the bottom was not improbably monotheistic. But as the thought of one all-governing mind, taking cognisance of every thought and action, was too fine and spiritual a conception for his orderly and practical nature, he who knew so well the value of organisation introduced that principle into the domain of the gods; and, instead of placing all the vast and varied departments of nature and of human affairs under the superintendence of the One Supreme, he felt it more business-like to assign separate departments to separate attributes, or aspects of the Deity; and thus applied to heaven that principle of the division of labour which he found so useful and necessary on earth. He therefore arranged the domain of the spiritual and unseen as he arranged his domestic and State affairs, assigning the higher departments to the greater gods, and the less important to those of low rank, until every portion of the vast realm of nature—sun and moon and stars, rivers and hills, trees and flowers, birds and beasts; every department of human labour -buying and selling, sowing and reaping; every stage of human life-birth, marriage, death, —each and all had their own presiding deities. In the same way, the varying conditions of the human body, and the different affections of the human mind - health and sickness, joy and sorrow, faith and love, hope and fear, virtue and vice-were elevated into so many distinct objects of worship. There was a god of thieves; there

was a god of drains and of evil smells. When we read of deities who had one special function to perform, and who are never heard of in any other relation—such as the god Vaticanus, who impelled the child to its first cry, and the god Fabulinus, who taught it to lisp its first word-we can hardly doubt that these were regarded not as separate and distinct personalities, but simply as the various attitudes or relations which the Deity bears to the creatures he has made. We can quite understand how, with such views, the Roman had no more difficulty in effecting changes in his Pantheon than in his home or State arrangements, displacing one god for another more in favour or in fashion at the time, or admitting new deities from other lands with the same ease with which he admitted their merchandise to his markets. While he certainly seems to have endowed each separate individual of his multitudinous deities with a sort of vague personality, it is in the highest degree probable that they were to him no more than attributes, or, at the highest, representatives or vicegerents of that one supreme and absolute Being who was to him the unknown and the unknowable One. There are many indications that such was the case. One is the common use of the word numen, to describe not so much any distinct or personal being as Divinity in the abstract. Another is the strange and significant formula with which, on great occasions, the officiating priest addressed the Deity: “Sive mas, sive femina, si deus, si dea: quisquis es; sive quo alio nomine fas est appellare." "Be thou god or goddess, man or woman: whoever thou art; or by whatever name it is right to call thee." At the foot of the Palatine there stands an altar of travertine, dedicated to the unknown God, on which this ancient inscription can still be read-"Sei deo sei deivæ sacrum."

It was prophetic of the social qualities and of the sober virtues which were to characterise the greatest people of the ancient world—of that reverence for the domestic relationship and for the purity of domestic life on which, as its one solid basis, national greatness must ever restthat the earliest, the most persistent and lasting of all the forms of their religion, was the worship of the spirits of their dead, and that the oldest of their deities, the mothergod of Rome, was the goddess of the hearth. What was it, and how did it arise? Of the earliest peopling of Italy we have no knowledge whatever. As far back as trustworthy information goes, we find the Italian branch of the great Aryan family already inhabiting the middle part of the beautiful peninsula, and isolated by sea and mountain from the rest of the world. Language would seem to indicate, that before the Græco-Italian stock broke off from the parent stem, they were so far acquainted with the cultivation of the soil, and had united the agricultural to the pastoral life. The movable tent of the wandering shepherd had already given place to the fixed hearth—the sacred shrine of the husbandman. If we could enter one of those ancient Roman dwellings, we should see a rude central chamber called the atrium, which served as the family kitchen and dining-room. In this chamber was the focus or hearth, and by the hearth, or forming part of it, an altar, on which burned night and day the sacred fire. The last duty at night was to cover it up, the first duty in the morning to feed its holy flame. It was extinguished only once a year, on the Ist of March, and immediately rekindled by rubbing pieces of dry wood together, or by concentrating the rays of the sun. That sacred fire, with the ideas which gathered round it, lay at the root of the political institutions and the moral greatness and strength of