Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/136

 130 THE FAMILY. BOOK II. Cicero's time ; it is no longer a poet, but a statesman, who speaks : " Here is my religion, here is my race, here are the traces of my forefathers. I cannot express the charm which I find here, and which penetrates my heart and my senses." ' We must place ourselves, in thought, in the midst of these primitive generations to understand how lively and powerful were these senti- ments, which were already enfeebled in Cicero's day. For us the house is merely a domicile — a shelter; we leave it, and forget it with little trouble ; or, if we are attached to it, this is merely by the force of habit and of recollections; because, for us, religion is not there; our God is the God of the universe, and we find him everywhere. It was entirely different among the an- cients ; they found their principal divinity within the house : this was their providence, which protected them individually, which heard their prayers, and granted their wishes. Out of the house, man no longer felt the presence of a god ; the god of his neighbor was a hostile god. Then a man loved his house as he now loves his church.'^ Thus the religion of the primitive ages was not foreign to the moral development of this part of hu- manity. Their gods enjoined purity, and forbade the shedding of blood; the notion of justice, if it was not born of this belief, must at least have been fortified by it. These gods belonged in common to all the mem- bers of the same family ; thus the family was united by a powerful tie, and all its members learned to love and respect each other. These gods lived in the in- • Cicero, De Legib., If. 1. Fro Domo, 41. spoke of as inviolable, Demosthenes, in Androi., 52; in Ever' gum, GO. Digest, de in jus voc, II. 4.
 * Of the sanctity of the domicile, which the ancients al«'ay9