Nor even in its indirect influence does the formal observance of the Roman worship seem likely at first sight to have done much for personal or national morality. Based upon fear, stereotyped in the form of a legal relationship, _religio_--'the bounden obligation'--made, no doubt, for a kind of conscientiousness in its adherents, but a cold conscientiousness, devoid of emotion and incapable of expanding itself to include other spheres or prompt to a similar scrupulousness in other relations. The rigid and constant distinction of sacred and profane would incline the Roman to fulfil the routine of his religious duty and then turn, almost with a sigh of relief, to the occupations of normal life, carrying with him nothing more than the sense of a burden laid aside and a pledge of external prosperity. Even the religious act itself might be without moral significance: as we have seen, the worshipper might be wholly ignorant of the character, even the name of the deity he worshipped, and in any case the motive of his action was naught, the act itself everything. Nor again had the Roman religion any trace of that powerful incentive to morality, a doctrine of rewards and punishments in a future life: the ideas as to the fate of the dead were fluctuating and vague, and the Roman was in any case much more interested in their influence on himself than in their possible experiences after death. The divorce then between religion and morality seems almost complete and it is not strange that most modern writers speak of the Roman religion as a tiresome ritual formalism, almost wholly lacking in ethical value. And yet it did not present itself in this light to the Romans themselves. Cicero, sceptic as he was, could speak of it as the cause of Rome's greatness; Augustus, the practical politician, could believe that its revival was an essential condition for the renaissance of the Roman character. Have we, in our brief examination of its characteristics, seen any features which may suggest the solution of this apparent antagonism? Was there in this formalism a life which escapes us, as we handle the dry bones of antiquarianism?