It has often been said of the Roman religion that it had nothing to do with righteousness, and was without ethical value. The admirable criticism of it given by Mommsen in the first volume of his History may originally have suggested this view; but if so, the copyists have exaggerated the opinion of the master in one particular point, failing to give due weight to the general tenor of his exposition. However this may be, we certainly are now always invited to conclude that this great people, which in its dealings with human beings discovered an extraordinary genius for expansion and adaptation, in its attitude to the supernatural remained cooped up within curiously narrow mental limits, drawing no real sustenance either from its primitive beliefs or its quaint and detailed practice. The current views of this kind have just lately been so well summed up in an admirable English work on the latest age of Roman society and thought, that I cannot do better than borrow a few sentences from it[1510]:— ‘The old Roman theology was a hard, narrow, unexpansive system of abstraction and personification, which strove to represent in its Pantheon the phenomena of nature, the relations of man in the State or in the clan, every act and feeling and incident in the life of the individual. Unlike the mythologies of Hellas and the East, it had no native principle of growth, or adaptation to altered needs of society and the individual imagination. It was also singularly wanting in awe and mystery. The religious spirit which it cultivated was formal, timid, and scrupulous.... The old Roman worship was businesslike and utilitarian. The gods were partners in a contract with their worshippers, and the ritual was characterized by the hard and literal formalism of the legal system of Rome. The worshipper performed his part to the letter with the scrupulous exactness required in pleadings before the praetor. To allow devotional feeling to transgress the bounds prescribed by immemorial custom was “superstitio.”’ It is impossible to deny that there is much truth in all this; yet I may venture to express a doubt whether it contains the whole truth. The fact is that the subject needs a more historical treatment, and perhaps also something of the historical imagination, to do it full justice.