And if we translate this, as we have learned to do, into terms of the state, we can get some idea of what the Romans meant by their debt to their religion. As the household was bound together by the tie of common worship, as in the intermediate stage the clan, severed politically and socially, yet felt itself reunited in the gentile rites, so too the state was welded into a whole by the regularly recurring annual festivals and the assurance of the divine sanction on its undertakings. It might be that in the course of time these rites lost their meaning and the community no longer by personal presence expressed its service to the gods, but the cult stood there still, as the type of Rome's union to the higher powers and a guarantee of their assistance against all foes: the religion of Rome was, as it has been said, the sanctification of patriotism--the Roman citizen's highest moral ideal. It has been remarked, perhaps with partial truth, that the religion of the _AEneid_--in many ways a summary of Roman thought and feeling--is the belief in the _fata Romae_ and their fulfilment. The very impersonality of this conception makes it a good picture of what religion was in the Roman state. It was not, as with the Jews, a strong conviction of the rightness of their own belief and a certainty that their divine protectors must triumph over those of other nations, but a feeling of the constant presence of some spirits, who, 'if haply they might find them,' would, on the payment of their due, bear their part in the great progress of right and justice and empire on which Rome must march to her victory. It was the duty of the citizen, with this conception of his city before his eyes, to see to it that the state's part in the contract was fulfilled. From his ancestors had been inherited the tradition, which told him the when, where, and how, and in the preservation of that tradition and its due performance consisted at once Rome's duty and her glory. 'If we wish,' says Cicero, 'to compare ourselves with other nations, we may be found in other respects equal or even inferior; in religion, that is in the worship of the gods, we are far superior.' The religion of Rome may not have advanced the theology or the ethics of the world, but it made and held together a nation. WORKS BEARING ON THE EARLY RELIGION OF ROME _The Golden Bough_, (2nd Ed.). J.G. FRAZER. _History of Rome_, BOOK I. CHAP XII. TH. MOMMSEN. _Die Religion der Roemer._ E. AUST. _Religion und Kultus der Roemer._ G. WISSOWA. _Il Culto Privato di Roma Antica_, PART I. A. DE-MARCHI. _The Roman Festivals._ W. WARDE FOWLER. _The Religion of Numa._ J.B. CARTER. Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press * * * * * End of Project Gutenberg's The Religion of Ancient Rome, by Cyril Bailey