It is, therefore, in obedience to a certain branch of the instinct of self-preservation that primitive peoples are so conservative in their customs and rites; but they show themselves no less willing to appropriate the customs and rites of other people whenever they can do so without abandoning their own. The Romans ultimately came to accept the cult of all the peoples in the world without, however, any abandonment of their national cult; and fêtes, which are properly survivals of paganism, subsist even at the present day; one acquires superstition, and customs, much more easily than one loses them. [Sidenote: Worship in public confirms cult.] The power of example contributes also to lend an additional stability to the public cult; an individual becomes hardened in a practice which he finds universal in the society in which he lives. Thence comes the importance of public worship; the practice of public worship makes those who abstain from it conspicuous. Public worship is a _viva voce_ poll. Everyone sits in judgment upon you, all of your acquaintances become your accusers, and all men who worship God are your enemies. Not to think as everybody else does is comprehensible—but not to act as everybody else does! To wish to break away from the servitude of action which, once established, tends to perpetuate itself! In the end the machine bends; one becomes brutalized. Even among people of superior minds the force of habit is incredible. In the hours of doubt, in his youth, M. Renan wrote to his adviser: “I recite the Psalms; I could pass hours and hours, if I but followed my own inclination, in the churches.... I experience lively returns of devotion.... At times I am simultaneously both Catholic and rationalist! When one cuts loose from such beliefs, beliefs which have become a second nature to one, it seems as if one has severed one’s self from one’s whole past. One has in some sense lived them, and one is attached to them as to one’s own life; to abandon them is to resolve to die to one’s self. It seems as if one’s entire strength had come from them and that one will be as feeble as a child when one has lost them; they are to one what Samson’s hair was to him. Happily they will grow again.” [Sidenote: Priesthood a consequence of established rites.] Priesthood is a consequence of the establishment of rites. The priest is the man supposed to be most capable of influencing the divinity by a minute and learned observation of the sacred rites. Rites, in effect, the moment they become complicated by an accumulation of diverse customs lie beyond the knowledge and power of the ordinary man; it requires a special education to talk to the gods in the complex language which alone they understand, in the formulæ which coerce their wills. Whoever possesses this imagination is a species of magician or sorcerer; and the priesthood arose out of sorcery, of which it was simply the regular organization.[47]