Besides the tribal gods, individual households had their special _penates_, to whom was due the first and the last salām of the returning or outgoing master. But in spite of all this superstitious apparatus the Arabs were never a religious people. In the old days, as now, they were reckless, sceptical, materialistic. They had their gods and their divining arrows, but they were ready to demolish both if the responses proved contrary to their wishes. An Arab, who wished to avenge the death of his father, went to consult the square block of white stone called El-Khalasa, by means of divining arrows. Three times he tried, and each time he drew the arrow forbidding vengeance. Then he broke the arrows, and flung them in the face of the idol, crying, “Wretch! if it had been _your_ father who was murdered, you would not have forbidden me to avenge him!” The great majority believed in no future life, nor in a reckoning day of good and evil. If a few tied camels to the graves of the dead that the corpse might ride mounted to the judgment-seat, they must have done so more by force of superstitious habit than anything else. Christianity and Judaism had made but small impress upon the Arabs. There were Jewish tribes in the north, and there is evidence in the Korān and elsewhere that the traditions and rites of Judaism were widely known in Arabia. But the creed was too narrow and too exclusively national to commend itself to the majority of the people. Christianity fared even worse. Whether or not St. Paul went there, it is at least certain that very little effect was produced by the preaching of Christianity in Arabia. We hear of Christians on the borders, and even two or three among the Mekkans, and bishops and churches are spoken of at Dhafār and Nejrān. But the Christianity that the Arabs knew was, like the Judaism of the northern tribes, a very imperfect reflection of the faith it professed to be. It had become a thing of the head instead of the heart, and the refinements of monophysite and monothelite doctrines gained no hold on the Arab mind.