The individualised and humanised Latin and Hellenic gods, if they had much in common, still could not be thoroughly amalgamated; but Rome, as the mistress of Western Asia and Egypt, came upon Oriental religions of a very different stamp. Instead of this wide Pantheon of gods, each of whom had his occupation, these Asiatics generally regarded the deity in a sexual relationship, as one male and one female god, representing the active and passive forms of nature,(9) and worshipped with a mixture of fear and voluptuousness. Such were Bel and Mylitta, Moloch and Astarte, and by whatever different names the same idea was presented. The worship of the great mother Cybele, so widely spread through Asia Minor, approached in many respects in character to that of this female goddess. But it is needless to go farther into the specific differences of these various idolatries; only bear in mind that they in their several countries occupied the domain of public and private life, as the worship of which I have given the details did at Athens. So it was before the influence of external conquerors reached them. After this a certain change ensues. The Roman empire was accomplishing in the west as well as in the east what the progress of Grecian rule and thought had commenced three hundred years before(10) under Alexander and his successors, the bringing together and in some sort fusing the multiform and often contradictory worship of the nations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Not merely in Rome, but in all the chief cities of the Empire, the Asiatic, the Egyptian, the Libyan deities, and many others of subject nations under the Roman sway, were worshipped side by side. Accordingly, in the time of Augustus, and at the year of Rome 750, where we are taking our stand, there prevailed all over the hundred millions of men ruled by him a polytheistic idolatry bewildering by its multiplicity, internal contradictions, fluctuations, and mixtures, yet imposing by its universal extent and prevalence. The only exception seems to have been the Jewish worship of one God, whether in its chief seat, the small province of Judæa, or as it was seen in the lives of Jewish settlers scattered throughout the empire. It must be remarked that this Jewish worship of the true God was sanctioned as that of a national god belonging to the Jews, and sacrifice was perpetually offered for Augustus in the Temple at Jerusalem. But the Jews did not, as a rule, make efforts to convert the Gentiles to their religion, nor seek to exhibit it as antagonistic to the prevailing idolatry, and as claiming to subdue and cast it out. They were content to keep their own worship to themselves, and with the toleration which the Roman law thus allowed them. Yet even so in every place where they dwelt in any numbers some of the better heathens were found to be attracted to their worship by the intrinsic beauty of their belief in one God.