There were, however, other ways in which Alexander’s conquests prepared the way for a religion which could make appeal to men of every nation and language. Nothing is more difficult for those brought up in a monotheistic faith, with its inbred contempt for the worshippers of many gods, than to realize how the ancients regarded the Divine. The peoples of classical antiquity seem to have everywhere believed in the gods of their neighbours as absolutely as they did in their own, for they imagined that their deities had, like men, only a limited sphere of action, or, to put it scientifically, were subject to the same conditions of space as their worshippers. Thus, the Syrians thought that Yahweh of Israel was a mountain god, who could not help his people when fighting in the plains[52], and the Philistines believed that the ark in which he lived would bring prosperity or disaster to the place in which it happened to be for the time being[53]. This is almost an exact parallel to the tale of the prince of Bactria, whose daughter was freed from demoniacal possession by an image of the Egyptian god Khonsu sent into Asia _ad hoc_, whereupon he decided that it would be wise to keep so powerful a god in his own country, and did so until frightened by a dream into sending the statue back[54]. But such ideas, however natural they may be to isolated or backward peoples, soon lost their hold upon the acute and logical Greeks, when they came into contact with civilized nations having pantheons differing widely from their own. The philosophers, indeed, by dint of hard reasoning on the subject, had formed before the time of Alexander a conception of the Supreme Being which does not differ materially from that of the educated Christian of the present day. “Loyal,” says Pater, “to the ancient beliefs, the ancient usages, of the religions of many gods which he had found all around him, Socrates pierces through it to one unmistakable Person, of perfect intelligence, power, and goodness who takes note of him[55]”; and the same thing might be said with even greater certainty of the deductions of Aristotle[56], whose declared monotheism caused him to be adopted in the Middle Ages as one of the Doctors of the Church. But there is no reason to believe that such lofty conceptions ever influenced in the slightest the beliefs of the common people, who alone count for anything in the evolution of the organized body of beliefs and practices which we call a religion. Socrates so successfully concealed his opinions in this respect from everybody but Plato, that the clear and practical mind of Xenophon seems to have never seen in him anything but a polytheist[57]: and that Aristotle’s monotheistic teachings were not intended for the common herd may be judged from the correspondence, whether actual or imaginary, between him and Alexander himself, in which the hero reproaches his former tutor for having published doctrines