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The descendants of those who had made religion out of an attempt to appease the hostile numina, feeling themselves not indeed on more familiar terms with their 'unknown gods, but only perhaps a little more confident of their own strength, were not likely to be wanting in a disciplined sense of dependence and an appreciation of the value of respect for authority, which alone can give stability to a constitution.

There is a passage in a story meet for this purpose: one Septimus Arabinus, a man famous, or rather infamous, for oppression, was put out of the Senate, but re-admitted about this time; Alexander Severus being chosen to the empire, the Senators did entertain him with public salutations and congratulations. Severus, espying Arabinus amongst the senators, cried out, O numina!

In no department of life is the specialisation of function among the numina more conspicuous than in connection with birth and childhood.

This sketch of the household worship of the Romans will, I hope, have justified my contention that there was in it an element more truly 'religious' than anything we should gather from the ceremonies of the state. The ideas are simpler, the numina seem less cold and more protective, the worshippers more sensible of divine aid.

The Semites declared that man was created in the image of God, and we created God in our own image; while conscious of the power of the numina we confronted them boldly, and were ready to resist them. The Indian legends, and those of the Hellenes, the Scandinavians, and the whole Aryan race, are full of conflicts between gods and men.

A noble stoicism breathes in the character of Æneas, the virtue of the virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it. " tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti, Præmia digna ferant!"

She has too a general superintendence of the rites of marriage, and the various little numina, who play so prominent a part in the ceremonies, tend to attach themselves to her as cult-titles.

But the most savage epigram against Julius was one that recalled the name of the great Roman, which the Pope was supposed to have adopted in emulation of that of Alexander, borne by his predecessor: "Julius est Romae. Quid abest? Date, numina, Brutum. Nam quoties Romae est Julius, illa perit." "Julius is at Rome. What is wanting? Ye gods, give us a Brutus!

More than race to the Roman; more than power to the statesman; yet helpless beside the grave, "Non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te, Restitvet pietas." Nay, also what it stands for as an attribute, not only of men, but of gods; nor of those only as merciful, but also as avenging. Against AEneas himself, Dido invokes the waves of the Tyrrhene Sea, "si quid pia numina possunt."

Your first glimpses of mortal vicissitudes have coincided with the awe and glitter of sacramental moments in which those numina were invoked; and on that deeper level of experience, in those lower reaches of irrationalism in which such impressions lie, they constitute a mystic resource subsisting beneath all conventions and overt knowledge.