From other polytheistic Semitic communities we have no record, so far as I am aware, that bears on the phenomenon that we are considering, except the famous Moabite Stone, of which the style is in this respect strikingly Biblical. Mesha regards himself as sent by his god Chĕmosh to take Nebo from Israel, and he explains why he slaughtered all within the walls, man, woman, and child, “for I had devoted it to Chĕmosh.” Fanaticism does not so naturally belong to polytheism as to monotheism; yet it seems that at times the polytheistic Semites could be as prone to this vice of the religious temper as the monotheistic Israelites. Speaking generally, and in comparison with the ancient Semitic and the mediaeval and even later spirit of Europe, we must pronounce the Hellenic temperament of the earlier and classical period as wholly innocent of fanaticism. The history of Hellas is not stained by any “war of religion”; and no religious hierarchy in Hellas ever possessed the power or displayed the will to suppress art or persecute science and thought. It might occasionally happen that individuals were in danger of punishment if they insulted or openly flouted the civic worship or introduced new deities; but that the State should protect itself thus is not fanaticism. The least tolerant of cities was the enlightened Athens. But her record in this matter is a spotless page compared {203} with the history of any later European State. Hellas owed this happy immunity to her cooler religious temper, to the equilibrium of the other life-forces within her, and to her comparative freedom from dark and cruel superstitious fears. It is specially in regard to such salient features of the religious temperament as we have been considering that the early Hellene asserted his spiritual independence of the East. CHAPTER XII. Eschatologic Ideas of East and West. {204} Religions are often found to differ fundamentally in their conceptions of the fate of the departed spirit of man, and in the prominence and importance they assign to the posthumous life. There is, in fact, a group of religions which we might term “other-worldly,” because certain dogmas concerning the world after death are made the basis on which their aspirations and ideals of conduct are constructed; to this group belong Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and the old Egyptian creed. There are other religions, also of a highly developed type, in which eschatologic doctrine plays no forcible or constructive part either in the theology or in the ethics. Such were the Mesopotamian, primitive Judaism, and the early Hellenic.