We may affirm generally, then, that the Mesopotamian and Hellenic religions are more or less on the same level of thought in respect of the moral and beneficent character of the deities. But careful study of the Hellenic will give us the impression that the terrible and destructive power of divinity is far less emphasised by cult than it was in the Eastern Semitic world. Every deity might be dangerous if neglected, and certainly would be if insulted. The idea of the “jealous god” is non-moral, and can easily become immoral: that is, it tends to divorce the conception of the divine character from the purely human moral ideal. And this idea is palpable not only in the Hellenic and Mesopotamian, but still more in the Judaic religion, and our own religion is not yet delivered from it. But apart {146} from this, the Hellenic imagination, so far as we can discern it, even in its infancy, did not construct manifold forms of fear out of the dangerous powers in the nature-world, and worship them with the higher forms of cult. We do not come upon aboriginal thunder gods and storm gods _per se_ (I use the term “god” advisedly): Zeus the thunderer had been civilised and moralised before Homer’s time. Poseidon had always his wild side as god of storms and earthquakes; and to the end he remains rather more a non-moral nature-power than the others; but destructive force was certainly not the centre of his personality, and in the pre-historic days he had become the father of the Minyan and Ionic people, and the guardian of their family life. The wind-powers might develop into beneficent gods or ancestors; or might occasionally be regarded from the lower standpoint of polydaimonism, and averted by magical means. The higher Hellenic religion did not admit such beings as “Ira,” the god of pestilence, or a special god of storms or earthquakes, and it is far less than the Babylonian a religion of fear. This difference will emerge more clearly in the study of ritual.