But by just as much as the human element was absent from the concept of
the deity, by just so much the element of formalism in the cult was
greater. This formalism must not be interpreted according to our modern
ideas; it was not a formalism which was the result and the successor of
a decadent spirituality; it was not a secondary product in an age of the
decline of faith; but it was itself the essence of religion in the
period of the greatest religious purity. In the careful and
conscientious fulfilment of the form consisted the whole duty of man
toward his gods. Such a state of affairs would have been intolerable in
any nation whose instincts were less purely legal. So identical were the
laws concerning the gods and the laws concerning men that though in the
earliest period of Roman jurisprudence the _ius divinum_ and the _ius
humanum_ are already separated, they are separated merely formally as
two separate fields or provinces in which the spirit of the law and
often even the letter of its enactment are the same. Such a formalism
implies a very firm belief in the existence of the gods. The dealings of
a man with the gods are quite as really reciprocal as his dealings with
his fellow citizens. But on the other hand though the existence of the
gods is never doubted for a moment, the gods themselves are an unknown
quantity; hence out of the formal relationship an intimacy never
developed, and while it is scarcely just to characterise the early cult
as exclusively a religion of fear, certainly real affection is not
present until a much later day. The potentiality of the gods always
overshadowed their personality. But this was not all loss, for the
absence of personality prevented the growth of those gross myths which
are usually found among primitive peoples, for the purer more inspiring
myths of gods are not the primitive product but result from the process
of refining which accompanies a people's growth in culture. Thus the
theory of animism illumines the religious condition of that borderland
of history in which Romulus and Numa Pompilius have their