|
|
Boulder Place Directory 09
Page 06
As Romulus was the founder of the political institutions of Rome, so Numa was the author of the religious institutions. Instructed by the nymph Egeria, whom he met in the sacred grove of Aricia, he instituted the Pontiffs, four in number, with a Pontifex Maximus at their head, who had the general superintendence of religion; the Augurs, also four in number, who consulted the will of the gods on all occasions, both private and public; three Flamens, each of whom attended to the worship of separate deities--Jupiter,[5] Mars, and Quirinus; four Vestal Virgins, who kept alive the sacred fire of Vesta brought from Alba Longa; and twelve Salii, or priests of Mars, who had the care of the sacred shields.[6] Numa reformed the calendar, encouraged agriculture, and marked out the boundaries of property, which he placed under the care of the god Terminus. He also built the temple of Janus, a god represented with two heads looking different ways. The gates of this temple were to be open during war and closed in time of peace.
In the trees that line one of the main streets and fashionable drives leading out of Washington city, and less than half a mile from the boundary, I have counted the nests of five different species at one time, and that without any very close scrutiny of the foliage, while in many acres of woodland, half a mile off, I searched in vain for a single nest. Among the five that interested me most was that of a blue grossbeak. Here this bird, which, according to Audubon's observations, in Louisiana is shy and recluse, affecting remote marshes and the borders of large ponds of stagnant water, had placed its nest in the lowest twig of the lowest branch of a large sycamore, immediately over a great thoroughfare, and so near the ground that a person standing in a cart or sitting on a horse could have reached it with his hand. The nest was composed mainly of fragments of newspaper and stalks of grass, and, though so low, was remarkably well concealed by one of the peculiar clusters of twigs and leaves which characterize this tree. The nest contained young when I discovered it, and though the parent birds were much annoyed by my loitering about beneath the tree, they paid little attention to the stream of vehicles that was constantly passing. It is a wonder to me when the birds could have built it, for they are much shyer when building than at other times. No doubt they worked mostly in the morning, having the early hours all to themselves.
The Pilgrims who settled New England were Independents, peculiar in their ecclesiastical tenet that the single congregation of godly persons, however few or humble, regularly organized for Christ's work, is of right, by divine appointment, the highest ecclesiastical authority on earth. A church of this order existed in London by 1568; another, possibly more than one, the "Brownists," by 1580. Barrowe and Greenwood began a third in 1588, which, its founders being executed, went exiled to Amsterdam in 1593, subsequently uniting with the Presbyterians there. These churches, though independent, were not strictly democratic, like those next to be named.
|
