If one looks at the vast mass of the world, ancient and modern, it is quite clear that religion consists, and has always consisted, of observances essentially similar to those just described among the Central African tribes. Its core is worship. Its centre is the God--that is to say, the Dead Ancestor or Relative. The religion of China is to this day almost entirely one of pure ancestor-cult. The making of offerings and burning of joss-paper before the Family Dead form its principal ceremonies. In India, while the three great gods of the mystical Brahmanist philosophy are hardly worshipped in actual practice at all, every community and every house has its own particular gods and its own special cult of its little domestic altar. “The first Englishman,” says Sir William Hunter, “who tried to study the natives as they actually are, and not as the Brahmans described them, was struck by the universal prevalence of a worship quite distinct from that of the Hindu deities. A Bengal village has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red-lead. Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity, and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduised low-castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts, or gods, of the village.” Omitting the mere guesswork about the fetish and the gratuitous supposition, made out of deference to the dying creed of Max-Müllerism, that ancestor-worship must necessarily {033}be a “non-Aryan” feature (though it exists or existed in all so-called Aryan races), this simple description shows us the prevalence over the whole of India of customs essentially similar to those which obtain in Central Africa and in the Chinese provinces. The Roman religion, in somewhat the same way, separates itself at once into a civic or national and a private or family cult. There were the great gods, native or adopted, whom the State worshipped publicly, as the Central African tribes worship the chiefs ancestors; and there were the Lares and Penates, whom the family worshipped at its own hearth, and whose very name shows them to have been in origin and essence ancestral spirits. And as the real or practical Hindu religion consists mainly of offering up rice, millet, and ghee to the little local and family deities or to the chosen patron god in the Brahmanist pantheon, so, too, the real or practical Roman religion consisted mainly of sacrifice done at the domestic altar to the special Penates, _farre pio et saliente mica_.