Guilt to us is an individual taint consequent on choice and cleaving
to the chooser. But in early ages the act of one member of the tribe
is conceived to make all the tribe impious, to offend its peculiar
god, to expose all the tribe to penalties from heaven. There is no
'limited liability' in the political notions of that time. The early
tribe or nation is a religious partnership, on which a rash member
by a sudden impiety may bring utter ruin. If the state is conceived
thus, toleration becomes wicked. A permitted deviation from the
transmitted ordinances becomes simple folly. It is a sacrifice of
the happiness of the greatest number. It is allowing one individual,
for a moment's pleasure or a stupid whim, to bring terrible and
irretrievable calamity upon all. No one will ever understand even
Athenian history, who forgets this idea of the old world, though
Athens was, in comparison with others, a rational and sceptical
place, ready for new views, and free from old prejudices. When the
street statues of Hermes were mutilated, all the Athenians were
frightened and furious; they thought that they should ALL be ruined
because some one had mutilated a god's image, and so offended him.
Almost every detail of life in the classical times--the times when
real history opens--was invested with a religious sanction; a sacred
ritual regulated human action; whether it was called 'law' or not,
much of it was older than the word 'law;' it was part of an ancient
usage conceived as emanating from a superhuman authority, and not to
be transgressed without risk of punishment by more than mortal
power. There was such a solidarite then between citizens, that each
might be led to persecute the other for fear of harm to himself.

It may be said that these two tendencies of the early world--that to
persecution and that to imitation--must conflict; that the imitative
impulse would lead men to copy what is new, and that persecution by