Which is perhaps a sign of this:  that Numa’s was a religion, the teaching of a (minor) Teacher who came long after the Mysteries had disappeared.  Because in the Mysteries, cosmogenesis was taught through dramas which were symbolic representations of its events and processes; and out of these dramas grew the stories about the gods.  But when the real spiritual teaching has ceased to flow through the Mysteries, and the stones are accepted literally, and there is nothing else to maintain the inner life of the people,—­a Teacher of some kind must come to state things in plainer terms.  This, I take it, is what happened here; and the very worn-outness of conditions that this implies, implies also tremendous cultural and imperial activities in forgotten time; I imagine Italy, then, at two or three thousand B.C., was playing a part as much greater outwardly than Greece was, as her part now is greater than Greece’s, and has been during recent centuries.

This, then, is what Numa’s religion did for Rome:—­it peopled the woods and fields and hills with these impersonal divinities; it peopled the moments of the day with them; so that nothing in space or time, no near familiar thing or duty, was material wholly, or pertained to this world alone;—­there was another side to it, connected with the unseen and the gods.  There were Great Gods in the Pantheon; but your early Roman had no wide-traveling imagination; and they seemed to him remote and uncongenial rather,—­and quickly took on Greekishness when the Greek influence began.  Minerva, vaguely imagined, assumed soon the attributes of the very concretely imagined Pallas; and so on.  But he had nearer and Numaish divinities much more a part of his life,—­which indeed largely consisted of rituals in their honor.  There were Lares and Penates and Manes, who made his home a kind of temple, and the earth a kind of altar; there were deities presiding over all homely things and occasions; formless impersonal deities; presences to be felt and remembered, not clothed imaginatively with features and myths:—­Cuba, who gave the new-born child its first breath; Anna Perenna of the recurring year; hosts of agricultural gods without much definition, and the unseen genii of wood, field, and mountain.  Everything, even each individual man, had a god-side:  there was something in it or him greater, more subtle, more enduring, than the personality or outward show.—­To the folk-lorist, of course, it is all ‘primitive Mediterranean’ religion or superstition; but the inner worlds are wonderful and vast, if you begin to have the smallest inkling of an understanding of them.  I think we may recognise in all this the hand of a wise old Pompilius from the Sabine hills, at work to keep the life of his Romans, peasant-bandits as they were, clean in the main and sound.  Yes, there were gross elements:  among the many recurring festivals, some were gross and saturnalian enough.  The Romans kept near Nature, in which are, both animal and cleansing forces; but the high old gravitas was the virtue they loved.  And supposing Numa established their religion, it does not follow that he established what there came to be of grossness in it.