the names of chiefs were frequently compounded of the word Baal—that is “god,” a fact naively recognised by the historians of the later and orthodox period by their changing Baal into El or Ja, the special names of the Hebrew tribal God. Similarly Abram is the high heaven, like Zeus or Jove.
This line of religion was still followed up in the period of ancient civilisation; the state and religion were one, as is indicated amongst other things by the temples having been used as popular meeting-places for pleasure, law or business. In short, in the ancient world, religion was ancestor-worship, developing, as the gens and the þeoð gave place to the city, into city-worship, in which the individual only felt his more elevated life as a part of the Holy City that had made him and his what they were, and would lead them to all excellence and glory.
We have mentioned that the city-confederacies of the East which assumed the appearance to later ages of great despotic 327 monarchies fell either into demoralisation or languid bureaucracy. From Asia the lead in civilisation passed to Europe, and the progress of humanity became speedy and brilliant. But the Ancient Civilisation, incomplete, founded on oligarchy, political and intellectual, and on industrial slavery of the crudest kind, had to undergo the law of change. The Greek cities, after fierce struggles among themselves for the leadership of their world, fell, destroyed by individual greed for position and fame, that took the place of the old city-worship. Their fall was helped by the new system of individualistic ethics, which put forward as the aim of life the excellence and moral qualities of the individual, looked at in himself, instead of those of the society of which he formed a part. Thus Greek civilisation fell into the clutches of the Tyrants, and again the lead passed westward into the hands of Rome—the most complete, self-contained and powerful development of the city-world. But again, as her power grew and the wealth of her oligarchy with it, the doom was awaiting; the boundless greed of the great slave-holding and tax-gathering capitalists,