But to return to the story. Bel was, at first, excluded from the sacrifice as the author of all the mischief; which really was somewhat hard upon him, since the other gods agreed to his proposal. But eventually a reconciliation takes place; the great bow of Anu is displayed in the heavens; Bel agrees that he will be satisfied with what war, pestilence, famine, and wild beasts can do in the way of destroying men; and that, henceforward, he will not have recourse to extraordinary measures. Finally, it is Bel himself who, by way of making amends, transports Hasisadra, his wife, and the faithful Nes-Hea to the abode of the gods.
It is as indubitable as it is incomprehensible to most of us, that, for thousands of years, a great people, quite as intelligent as we are, and living in as high a state of civilisation as that which had been attained in the greater part of Europe a few centuries ago, entertained not the slightest doubt that Anu, Bel, Ea, Istar, and the rest, were real personages, possessed of boundless powers for good and evil.
The sincerity of the monarchs whose inscriptions gratefully attribute their victories to Merodach, or to Assur, is as little to be questioned as that of the authors of the hymns and penitential psalms which give full expression to the heights and depths of religious devotion. An "infidel" bold enough to deny the existence, or to doubt the influence, of these deities probably did not exist in all Mesopotamia; and even constructive rebellion against their authority was apt to end in the deprivation, not merely of the good 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 Iought 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 ordinary men; if the divine intelligence is supposed to be so imperfect that it cannot foresee the consequences of its own contrivances; if the supernal powers can become furiously angry with the creatures of their omnipotence and, in their senseless wrath, destroy the innocent along with the guilty; or if they can show themselves to be as easily placated by presents and gross flattery as any oriental or occidental despot; if, in short, they are only stronger than mortal men and no better, as it must be admitted Hasisadra's deities proved themselves to be--then, surely, it is time for us to look somewhat closely into their credentials, and to accept none but conclusive evidence of their existence.
To the majority of my respected contemporaries this reasoning will doubtless appear feeble, if not worse. However, to my mind, such are the only arguments by which the Chaldaean theology can be satisfactorily upset. So far from there being any ground for the belief that Ea, Anu, and Bel are, or ever were, real entities, it seems to me quite infinitely more probable that they are products of the religious imagination, such as are to be found everywhere and in all ages, so long as that imagination riots uncontrolled by scientific criticism.
