That in this prayer, and the others which accompany it, exactness of wording was believed to be essential, as in the ritual which preceded it exactness of performance, there is no doubt; for at the end of the whole document (vi. B. 48) we find that if there had been any slip in the ritual, the Brethren had to go back to the first gate and begin all over again. There is plainly present the idea, surviving from an age of magic, that the deities had strong feelings about the right way of invocation, and would not respond to the performance unless those feelings were understood and appealed to; that they would miss something and decline to do their part. Yet are we justified in going on to assume that they were bound, as by a solemn contract, to perform their part, if there were no slip in the ritual? I confess it is difficult for me to take this further step, in view of the language of the prayers, which is so clearly that of petition, nay, of humble petition. We are not dealing here with _vota_, to which I shall come in the next lecture, and in which there is a kind of legal contract between the man and the god--the former undertaking to do something pleasing to the deity, if the latter shall have faithfully performed what is asked of him. These _vota_, so abundant in historical times, are really responsible for the idea that Roman prayer is simply a binding formula--a magical spell, let us say, which in the hands of a city priesthood has become a quasi-legal formula. But these prayers are not _vota_; they do not contain any language which betrays the notion of binding the deity. They seem to me to mark a process of transition between the age of spell and magic and the age of prayer and religion; they retain some of the outward characteristics of spell, but internally, _i.e._ in the spirit in which they were intended, they have the real characteristics of prayer.[394] The numina to whom they were addressed were powerful spirits, unknown, unfamiliar, until their wishes were discovered by the organised priesthood which handed down these forms of petition.