Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/166

 160 THE CITY. BOOK III miglit destroy the labor and hope of all the year. At €very moment he felt his own feebleness and the incomparable j^ower of what surrounded him. He ex- perienced perpetually a mingled feeling of veneration, love, and terror for this power of nature. This sentiment did not conduct him at once to the <;onceplion of an only God ruling the universe; for as yet he had no idea of the universe. He knew not that the earth, the sun, and the stars are parts of one same body; t!ie thought did not occur to him that they ) might all be ruled by the same being. On first looking upon the external world, man pictured it to himself as a sort of confused republic, where rival forces made war upon each other. As he judged external objects from himself, and felt in himself a free person, he saw also in every part of creation, in the soil, in the tree, in the cloud, in the water of the river, in the sun, so many persons like himself He endued them with thought, volition, and choice of acts. As he thought them pow- erful, and was subject to their empire, he avowed his dependence ; he invoked them, and adored them ; he made gods of them. Thus in this race the religious idea presented itself under two different forms. On the one hand, man attached the divine attribute to the invisible principle, to the intelligence, to what he perceived of the soul, to what of the sacred he felt in himself. On the other hand, he applied his ideas of the divine to the external object which he saw, which he loved or feared; to physical agents that were the masters of his happiness and of his life. These two orders of belief laid the foundation of two religions that lasted as lon2r as Greek and Roman society. They did not make war upon each other;