The growing effectiveness of the desire, as seen in the family and in the agricultural stage, prepares us for still greater effectiveness in the higher form of civilisation which we know as that of the City-state. That desire, let me say once more, is to be in right relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe. It is only in the higher stages of civilisation that this desire can really become effective; social organisation, as I shall show, produces an increased knowledge of the nature of the Power, and with it a systematisation of the means deemed necessary to secure the right relations. The City-state, the peculiar form in which Greek and Italian social and political life eventually blossomed and fructified, was admirably fitted to secure this effectiveness. It was, of course, an intensely _local_ system; and the result was, first, that the Power is localised in certain spots and propitiated by certain forms of cult within the city wall, thus bringing the divine into closest touch with the human population and its interests; and secondly, that the concentration of intelligence and will-power within a small space might, and did at Rome, develop a very elaborate system for securing the right relations--in other words, it produced a religious system as highly ritualistic as that of the Jews. With the several aspects of this system my fifth and succeeding lectures will be occupied. I shall deal first with the religious calendar of the earliest historical form of the City-state, which most fortunately has come down to us entire. I shall devote two lectures to the early Roman ideas of divinity, and the character of their deities as reflected in the calendar, and as further explained by Roman and Greek writers of the literary age. Two other lectures will discuss the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, with the priests in charge of these ceremonies, and the ritual of vows and of "purification." In each of these I shall try to point out wherein the weakness of this religious system lay--viz. in attempts at effectiveness so elaborate that they overshot their mark, in a misconception of the means necessary to secure the right relations, and in a failure to grow in knowledge of the Power itself.