practical life were of greater importance than the maintenance of a rigid conformity to the letter of religious precepts. Virgil, who was a participant in the work of religious reform inaugurated by Augustus, and who everywhere breathes a spirit of the most careful reverence towards the ancient traditions of the national faith, gives emphatic expression to this view of the dominant claims of practical life, and of the tolerant attitude which Religion assumes with regard to them:— “Quippe etiam festis quædam exercere diebus Fas et jura sinunt; rivos deducere nulla Relligio vetuit, segeti prætendere sæpem, Insidias avibus moliri, incendere vepres, Balantumque gregem fluvio mersare salubri.”[31] This recognition of the principle that Duty has claims which even Religion must concede is prominently written on every page of Roman History. It indicates the operation, in one direction, of that influence of Reason on Religion which, in another direction, leads to the admission of a real divinity in the gods adored by foreign peoples. The famous formula of Roman Religion, which appealed to the protecting gods of Carthage and its people to leave that city to its fate, is an early anticipation of that hospitable tolerance, so strange to modern sects, which welcomed Greek and barbarian deities to the Roman Pantheon, and never persecuted from religious motives.[32] This spirit had its apotheosis in the endeavours of the reformers of the age of Plutarch to establish the triumph of Reason in a general recognition of the Unity of God beneath the different names which expressed Him to different peoples.[33]