up the instinct, because man is then brought face to face with these eternal facts; there is no need of extraordinary perils, such as tempests or pestilences, to keep the instinct alive. But in the life of the State as such there were no such continually recurring reminders; even the old agricultural perils were out of sight of the ordinary citizen. Thus the farthest we can go in ascribing a moral influence to the State religion is in giving it credit for helping to maintain that sense of law and order which served to keep the life of the family sound and wholesome. That it did to some extent perform this service I have already pointed out;[467] and it is a remarkable fact that the decay of the State religion was coincident, in the last two centuries B.C., with the decay of the family life and virtues. But on the whole, as we shall see, the _ius divinum_ had rather the effect of hypnotising the religious and moral instinct than of keeping it awake. It needed new perils for the State as a whole to re-create that feeling which is the root of the growth of conscience; and when the craving did at last come upon the Roman, which in times of doubt and peril has come upon individuals and communities in all ages, for support and comfort from the Unseen, it had to be satisfied by giving him new gods to worship in new ways--aliens with whom he had nothing in common, who had no home in his patriotic feeling, no place in his religious experience.[468] I wish to conclude this first part of my subject by giving some account of the first beginning of this introduction of new deities, _di novensiles_ as they were called,[469] into the old Roman religious world. Those, however, of whom I shall speak here were not introduced as the result of disaster or distress, but were simply the inevitable consequence of the growing importance of the city on the Tiber--of the beginnings of her commercial and political relations with her neighbours, and also of her own development in the arts of civilisation. The religious system with which I have so far been dealing was the exclusive property, we must remember, of those _gentes_, with the families composing them, which formed the original human material of the State, and were known as _patrician_. If we had no other reason for being sure of this, the fact that all State priesthoods were originally limited to patrician families would be sufficient to prove it;[470] even down to the latest times the _rex sacrorum_, the three _flamines maiores_, and the _Salii_ were necessarily of patrician birth--a fact which had much to do with their tendency to disappear in the last age of the Republic.