We see then that the Roman religion was never a great imaginative creation, but was always a great statecraft, and that Roman religion began to be Roman statecraft when Numa identified the affections and the piety of the hearth with the affections and the piety of the _res publica_, and made the State the social unit. The original ingredients of Roman religion however had nothing to do with statecraft; they were the ingredients of nature worship, the ingredients brought by a pastoral people. At the source was a reverence for natural things; and old Latin paganism had the peace which belongs to the pastoral life, and to the religion which is founded on the careful observance of potent rites disturbed as yet by no speculative questionings. But it was not free of the gloom of nature-worship--the obverse side of nature-cult--fearful, suspicious, weighted with destiny, as one imagines the religion of Etruria to have been. [Illustration: SAN CLEMENTE, CHOIR AND TRIBUNE OF UPPER CHURCH The present twelfth-century building was erected over a much more ancient church, and the site was probably one of the earliest meeting-places of the Christians and may have been that of the house of Clement (the fourth pope) as tradition affirms. A temple and altar to Mithras was found below the lower church. The ancient choir is in very perfect preservation, and its screen, removed from the lower church, is of the sixth century, with portions even of the fourth. See pages 35-36, 183, 186-7.]