Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/324

 the end, in fact, of this power is the human end and is suggested by men. The Romans revere the gods because they make use of them and when they make use of them, especially in the crisis of war.

The introduction of new gods takes place in times of difficulty and anxiety or because of vows. It is distress or trouble which in general constitutes with them the universal theogony. Connected with this also is the fact that the oracle, the Sibylline books are regarded as something divine, by means of which the people get to know what they should do or what ought to happen if they are to be benefited. Arrangements of this sort are in the hands of the State or the magistrate.

This religion is not at all a political religion in the sense in which all the religions already treated of are, in the sense that the nation has in religion the supreme consciousness of its life as a State and of its morality, and is indebted to the gods for the general arrangements connected with the State, such as agriculture, property, and marriage. In the Roman religion, on the contrary, reverence for and gratitude to the gods are closely connected, partly with definite individual cases, e.g., deliverance from danger, and partly with public authority of all kinds and with state transactions, in a prosaic way, and religious feeling is in general mixed up in a finite way with finite ends and with the deliberations and resolutions connected with these.

Thus speaking generally the character of empirical particularity is impressed on necessity; it is divine, and from a religious feeling which is identical with superstition there springs up a collection of oracles, auspices, Sibylline Books, which on the one hand minister to the end aimed at by the State and on the other to particular interests. The individual on the one hand disappears in a universal element, in sovereignty, Fortuna publica, and on the other human ends are regarded as having value in themselves, and the human subject or individual has an independent,