A more interesting and fruitful ground of comparison is that which looks at the inward sentiment or psychic emotion of the different religions, at the personal emotional relation of the individual towards the godhead. As I observed before, a clear judgment on this question is only possible when the religious memorials of a people are numerous, varied, and personal, so that some of them at least may be regarded as the expression of the individual spirit. Even if the priest or the ritual dictates the expression, the pious and frequent votary may come to feel genuinely what is dictated to him. Hence we can gather direct testimony concerning the ancient Babylonian as we can of the ancient Hebrew religious temper and emotion; for though most of the Mesopotamian documents are concerned with the royal ceremonial, which does not usually reveal genuine personal feeling, yet in this case the royal inscriptions, whether religious narrative or liturgies or prayers, are unusually convincing as revelations of self. And besides these, we have many private hymns of penance and formulae of exorcism. On the other hand, the ancient Western world and even historic Greece is singularly barren of this kind of religious testimony. We know much about the {191} State religion, but we have very few ritual formulae or public or private prayers. Our evidence is mainly the religious utterances of the higher poetry and literature and a few lyric hymns composed not for the solitary worshipper, but for common and tribal ritual-service. But we have also the mythology and the art and the general manifestations of the Hellenic spirit in other directions that enable us to conclude something concerning the religious psychology of the average man in the historic periods, and if we find this markedly different from that of the oriental, we shall find it hard to believe that the Babylonian spirit could have worked with any strong influence on the proto-Hellene.