But the jest of Fuscus was the earnest of many. If men were conscious of decay in the sanction which religion had once given to morality, there was still a great deal of vague religious feeling among the uneducated and partially educated classes. Again and again we read complaints of the folly of grandmothers and nurses, and it was from them that the first impressions of childhood came. Four centuries later than the period now under discussion it was still the same. "When once vain superstition obsessed the heathen hearts of our fathers, unchecked was its course through a thousand generations. The tender hope of the house shuddered, and worshipped whatever venerable thing his hoary grandsires showed him. Infancy drank in error with its mother's milk. Amid his cries the sacred meal was put between the baby's lips. He saw the wax dripping upon the stones, the black _Lares_ trickling with unguent. A little child he saw the image of Fortune with her horn of wealth, and the sacred stone that stood by the house, and his mother pale at her prayers before it. Soon himself too, raised high on his nurse's shoulders, he pressed his lips to the stone, poured forth his childish prayers, and asked riches for himself from the blind rock, and was sure that, whatever one wished, that was where to ask. Never did he lift his eyes and his mind to turn to the citadel of reason, but he believed, and held to the foolish custom, honouring with blood of lambs the gods of his family. And then when he went forth from his home, how he marvelled at the public festivals, the holy days and the games, and gazed at the towering Capitol, and saw the laurelled servants of the gods at the temples while the Sacred Way echoed to the lowing of the victims." So wrote Prudentius.[28] So too wrote Tibullus--"Keep me, _Lares_ of my fathers; for ye bred me to manhood when a tender child I played at your feet."[29] {12} How crowded the whole of life was with cult and ritual and usage, how full of divinities, petty, pleasing or terrible, but generally vague and ill-defined, no one will readily realize without special study, but some idea of the complexity of the Roman's divine environment can be gained from even a cursory survey of Ovid's _Fasti_, for example, or Tertullian's _Apology_, or some of the chapters of the fourth book of Augustine's _City of God_. "When," asks Augustine, "can I ever mention in one passage of this book all the names of gods and goddesses, which they have scarcely been able to compass in great volumes, seeing that they allot to every individual thing the special function of some divinity?" He names a few of the gods of agriculture--Segetia, Tutilina, Proserpina, Nodutus, Volutina, Patelana, Lacturnus, Matuta, etc. "I do not mention all."[30] "Satan and his angels have filled the whole world," said Tertullian.[31] [Sidenote: Fauns, trees, and wells]