so much space in the Babylonian sacred literature. The
confessions they contain are not very spiritual; the supplicant
bewails his sufferings rather than his sins. Indeed, he rather infers
from his sufferings that he has sinned, trodden, it may be, where he
ought not to have trodden, or eaten what he should not have eaten,
than confesses that he deserved to suffer for sins of which he is
aware. What is implored is outward redress or ease, not inward peace.
The removal of outward ills is taken as forgiveness. There can be no
comparison between these hymns and those of the Bible. But what they
do show is the rise in Babylonia of a religion for the individual.
The gods are sought not only officially by the state or for state
ends, but by the individual. They are believed to have regard to
individual sufferings; and the friends of a dying person believe that
the gods care for and will receive his soul.

Our knowledge of the religion of these lands is too imperfect to
admit of wide conclusions being drawn from it. We know what the
higher religion of Babylonia was; and we also see that the higher
worship never entirely prevailed in this land; the god, like Bel or
Assur, who bore the character of a human over-lord, never drove out
the old set of spirits, nor brought the service of them to an end. As
in the case of Egypt, so here the attempts made in the direction of a
pure and spiritual worship met with no ultimate success. Babylon and
Assyria never came so near to Monotheism as did Egypt three
millenniums before Christ. Nabonidos, the last king of Babylon,
collected all the gods together in his capital, and endeavoured to
organise them in a system under Merodach as their head; but this led
to religious discord rather than to peace, since the minor deities
vehemently resented the removal of their images from their accustomed
shrines, and were understood to refuse their aid to the state on the
new conditions. The religion of Babylon was too much broken up into
independent local cults to admit of such a unification. The highest
that was reached was that one great god was adored in one city,
another in another, with some depth and spirituality. To nations
which had attained a higher faith, that of Babylon appeared to be an
idolatrous worship of many gods. That is a harsh judgment. This
religion also had life in it and advanced from a lower to a higher
stage; from a timid trafficking with spirits to a service of gods who
were id