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.
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