Behind the external act lies the internal world of thought and feeling. The social sanction may invest the ceremony itself with so much force that the worshipper's interest may lie rather in the due performance of the rite than in the deity to whom it is addressed. The element of belief may be relatively vague and indefinite. But in the more highly organised religions belief also may externalise itself through hymn and prayer, through myth and history and prophecy. When a religion is strong enough to create a literature, a fresh object of comparison is presented. The utterances of poet and sage, of lawgiver and seer, can be set side by side. Their conceptions of the Powers towards which worship is directed can be studied; the characters and functions of the several deities can be determined. This {22} is the intellectual element in religion. It has often been regarded as the element of most importance, because it seemed most readily to admit of the test of truth. It finds its most formal expression in the articles of a creed, and has sometimes been erected into the chief ground of the supreme arbitrament of heaven and hell. There remains the element of feeling. This also may be so entangled in tradition, so enveloped in the pressure of surrounding influences, that it is at first obscure and indistinct. But its importance was early recognised when the origin of religion was ascribed to fear, in the oft-quoted line of the Roman Satirist Petronius Arbiter at the court of Nero (who committed suicide A.D. 66)-- "Primus in orbe deos fecit timor.