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.
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