n the temple of Jerusalem was defeated by the unanimous resolution of a
people who dreaded death much less than such an idolatrous profanation.
[8] Their attachment to the law of Moses was equal to their detestation
of foreign religions. The current of zeal and devotion, as it was
contracted into a narrow channel, ran with the strength, and sometimes
with the fury, of a torrent.

[Footnote 102: This facility has not always prevented intolerance, which
seems inherent in the religious spirit, when armed with authority. The
separation of the ecclesiastical and civil power, appears to be the only
means of at once maintaining religion and tolerance: but this is a very
modern notion. The passions, which mingle themselves with opinions, made
the Pagans very often intolerant and persecutors; witness the Persians,
the Egyptians even the Greeks and Romans.

1st. The Persians.--Cambyses, conqueror of the Egyptians, condemned to
death the magistrates of Memphis, because they had offered divine honors
to their god. Apis: he caused the god to be brought before him, struck
him with his dagger, commanded the priests to be scourged, and ordered
a general massacre of all the Egyptians who should be found celebrating
the festival of the statues of the gods to be burnt. Not content with
this intolerance, he sent an army to reduce the Ammonians to slavery,
and to set on fire the temple in which Jupiter delivered his oracles.
See Herod. iii. 25--29, 37. Xerxes, during his invasion of Greece, acted
on the same principles: l c destroyed all the temples of Greece and
Ionia, except that of Ephesus. See Paus. l. vii. p. 533, and x. p. 887.

Strabo, l. xiv. b. 941. 2d. The Egyptians.--They thought themselves
defiled when they had drunk from the same cup or eaten at the same table
with a man of a different belief from their own. "He who has voluntarily
killed any sacred animal is punished with death; but if any one, even
involuntarily, has killed a cat or an ibis, he cannot escape the extreme
penalty: the people drag him away, treat him in the most cruel manner,
sometimes without waiting for a judicial sentence. * * * Even at the
time when King Ptolemy was not yet the acknowledged friend of the
Roman people, while the multitude were paying court with all possible
attention to the strangers who came from Italy * * a Roman having killed
a cat, the people rushed to his house, and neither the entreaties of the
nobles, whom the king sent to them, nor t