not end too early.  It was an order that tended to leave no room in the world but for the fittest, physically and morally, if not mentally.  There was discipline, and again and always discipline:  paterfamilias king in his household, with power of life and death over his children.  It was a regime that gave little chance for loose living.  A sterile and ugly regime, Nevertheless; and, later, they fell victims to its shortcomings.  Vice, that wrecks every civilization in its turn, depend upon it had wrecked one here:  that one of which we get faint reminiscences in the stories of the Roman kings.  Then these barren and severe conditions ensued, and vice was (comparatively speaking) cleaned out.

What were the inner sources of this people’s strength?  What light from the Spirit shone among them?  Of the Sacred Mysteries, what could subsist in such a community?—­Well; the Mysteries had, by this time, as we have seen, very far declined.  Pythagoras had made his effort in this very Italy; he died in the first year of the fifth century soon after the expulsion of the kings, according to the received chronology;—­in reality, long before there is dependable history of Rome at all.  There had been an Italian Golden Age, when Saturn reigned and the Mysteries ruled human life.  There were reminiscences of a long past splendor; and an atmosphere about them, I think, more mellow and peace-lipped than anything in Hesiod or Homer.  I suppose that from some calmer, firmer, and more benignant Roman Empire manvantaras back, when the Mysteries were in their flower and Theosophy guided the relations of men and nations, some thin stream of that divine knowledge flowed down into the pralaya; that an echo lingered,—­at Cumae, perhaps, where the Sibyl was,—­ or somewhere among the Oscan or Sabine mountains.  Certainly nothing remained, regnant and recognised in the cities, to suggest a repugnance to the summer campaigns, or that other nations had their rights.  Yet there was something to make life sweeter than it might have been.

They said that of old there had been a King in Rome who was a Messenger of the Gods and link between earth and heaven; and that it was he had founded their religion.  Was Numa Pompilius, a real person?—­By no means, says modern criticism.  I will quote you Mr. Stobart:—­

“The Seven Kings of Rome are for the most part mere names which have been fitted by rationalizing historians, presumably Greek, with inventions appropriate to them.  Tomulus is simply the patron hero of Rome called by her name.  Numa, the second, whose name suggests numen, was the blameless Sabine who originated most of the old Roman cults, and received a complete biography largely borrowed from that invented for Solon.”