At all times and in all countries it is difficult to define the current convictions of human beings as to non-human or supra-human agencies; we always find a minority who reflect and study and discuss, a majority who tremble; if we pay attention only to the enlightened men of any particular period, we find a certain resemblance in their speculations, a similar tendency to distinguish between superstition and religion, a disinclination to ascribe to the divine agencies vulgar and petty interference with human concerns; on the other hand, if we fix our attention upon the voiceless multitude, we find no distinction between religion and superstition, and a strong inclination to see even in trivial occurrences an intervention of the divinity. We cannot gather from Plato or Cicero the religious faith of the majority of the active men of their day; still less can we infer it from the mythologies of the poets. Polytheism had no dogmatic faith; it did not ask a man to state what he believed; it took note of what he did. Deference to accepted forms of worship was expected; men paid a mutual respect to one another’s observances; all methods of conciliating the favour of the gods were good; the dangerous man was the man of no observances; there was no knowing what wrath he might bring down upon the community. Many of the ancients developed eclectic tendencies in the matter of religion; the temper of Herodotus was a common one among the enlightened, and the inclination to see points of resemblance in various cults rather than to emphasize differences. Germanicus was travelling from shrine to shrine in the East when he caught the fever which killed him; Apuleius at a later date travelled widely with a view to being initiated into the different mysteries. The conception that there was One God and One God only who ought to be worshipped, and that acts of adoration to other divinities, or powers in which divinity was recognized, constituted an act of treason to Him, was an impossible conception to the ancients; in spite of the unitarian tendencies, which we may detect even in Hesiod, and which became increasingly prevalent among the speculative philosophers, a deity was local rather than universal; it would have been dangerous to attempt to substitute the worship of Pallas Athene at Ephesus for that of Artemis, to remove Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome and put Melkarth in his place; but no Ephesian thought the Athenian wrong in worshipping Pallas, no Roman saw a dangerous heresy in the cult of Melkarth at Tyre or Carthage.