In the typical and organised worship of the State, _i.e._ sacrifice honorific and piacular, sanctioned by the _ius divinum_, the utmost care was taken that the whole procedure should be in every sense acceptable to the deity; that nothing _profanum_ should cross the threshold of the divine; hence it was quiet, orderly, dignified. The feeling that communication with the deity invoked was impossible save under such conditions was very strong in the Roman mind, stronger perhaps than with any other people whose religious practice is known to us; and the sense of obligation and duty, _pietas_, as they called it, was thus very early developed, and of infinite value to the State in its youth. This is entirely in keeping with what we have learnt in the last two lectures of the ideas of the Romans about the nature of their deities, and throws additional light on those ideas. They did not as yet know too much about the divine beings and their powers and wishes; familiarity had not yet bred contempt; _religio_, as we saw, was still strong among them--the feeling of awe that is likely to diminish or disappear when you have your god before you in the form of an idol. It is a principle of human nature that where knowledge is imperfect, care must be taken to be on the safe side; this is true of all practical undertakings, and as the religion of the Romans was that of a practical people with a practical end in view, it was particularly true of them. First then, in order that the worship might be entirely acceptable to the deity invoked, it was essential that the person who conducted it should be also acceptable. At the head of the whole system was the rex, who was priest as well as king. We do not know, of course, exactly how the rex was appointed; but in the case of the typical priest-king Numa, Livy has described his _inauguratio_ in terms of the _ius divinum_ of later times for the appointment of priests, and we may take it as fairly certain that the same principle held good from the earliest times.[353] After being summoned (so the story ran) from the Sabine city of Cures by the Senate, he consulted the gods about his own fitness. He was then conducted by the augur to the arx on the Capitol, and sat down on a stone facing the south. The augur took his seat on his left hand (the lucky side) with veiled head, holding the _lituus_[354] of his office in his right hand, with which, after a prayer, he marked out the _regiones_ from east to west, the north being to the left, the south to the right, and silently noted some object in the extreme distance of the _ager Romanus_, as the farthest point where the appearance of an omen might be accepted. Then, passing the _lituus_ to his left hand, he laid his right on the head of Numa, and uttered this prayer: "Father Jupiter, if it be thy will (_fas_) that this Numa Pompilius, on whose head my hand is laid, be king of Rome, I pray thee give us clear token within