d name, but of the skin of the offender. The adherents
of modern theological systems dismiss these objects of the love and
fear of a hundred generations of their equals, offhand, as "gods of the
heathen," mere creations of a wicked and idolatrous imagination; and,
along with them, they disown, as senseless, the crude theology, with its
gross anthropomorphism and its low ethical conception of the divinity,
which satisfied the pious souls of Chaldaea.

I imagine, though I do not presume to be sure, that any endeavour
to save the intellectual and moral credit of Chaldaean religion,
by suggesting the application to it of that universal solvent of
absurdities, the allegorical method, would be scouted; I will not
even suggest that any ingenuity can be equal to the discovery of the
antitypes of the personifications effected by the religious imagination
of later ages, in the triad Anu, Ea, and Bel, still less in Istar.
Therefore, unless some plausible reconciliatory scheme should be
propounded by a Neo-Chaldaean devotee (and, with Neo-Buddhists to
the fore, this supposition is not so wild as it looks), I suppose the
moderns will continue to smile, in a superior way, at the grievous
absurdity of the polytheistic idolatry of these ancient people.

It is probably a congenital absence of some faculty which I ought to
possess which withholds me from adopting this summary procedure. But I
am not ashamed to share David Hume's want of ability to discover
that polytheism is, in itself, altogether absurd. If we are bound, or
permitted, to judge the government of the world by human standards, it
appears to me that directorates are proved, by familiar experience, to
conduct the largest and the most complicated concerns quite as well as
solitary despots. I have never been able to see why the hypothesis of
a divine syndicate should be found guilty of innate absurdity. Those
Assyrians, in particular, who held Assur to be the one supreme and
creative deity, to whom all the other supernal powers were subordinate,
might fairly ask that the essential difference between their system and
that which obtains among the great majority of their modern theological
critics should be demonstrated. In my apprehension, it is not the
quantity, but the quality, of the persons, among whom the attributes
of divinity are distributed, which is the serious matter. If the divine
might is associated with no higher ethical attributes than those which
obtain among ord