Thenext important section of our survey is the comparison of the social and ethical aspects of the religions in the eastern and western areas. Here again the former warning may be repeated, not to draw rash conclusions from the observance of mere general points of similarity, such as occur in the religious systems of all the more advanced societies of which we have any explicit record.
The idea that religion is merely a concern of the private individual conscience is one of the latest phenomena in all religious history. Both for the primitive and the more cultured communities of ancient history, religion was by a law of its nature a social phenomenon, a force penetrating all the institutions of the political life, law and morality. But its precise contribution to the evolution of certain social products in the various communities is still a question inviting and repaying much research. It will be interesting to compare what may be gleaned from Assyriology and the study of Hellenism bearing on this inquiry, although it may not help us much towards the solution of our main question.
We may assume of the Mesopotamian as of other peoples, that its “social origins” were partly religious; only in the valley of the Euphrates, society had alreadyso far advanced in the fifth millennium B.C. that the study of its origins will be always problematic. The deities are already national, having developed far beyond the narrow tribal limits before we begin to discern them clearly; we have not to deal with the divinities of clans, phratries, or septs, but of complex aggregates, such as cities and kingdoms. And the great cities are already there before our knowledge begins.
In the Sumerian myth of creation, it is the high god himself who, after settling the order of heaven and earth, immediately constructs cities such as Borsippa; a passage in Berosus speaks of Oannes, that is to say, Ea as the founder of cities and temples;117.1and the myths may enshrine the truth that the origin of the Mesopotamian city was often religious, that the temple was its nucleus. I cannot discover that this is indicated by the names of any other of the great cities, Babylon, Borsippa, Sippar, Kutha; but it is shown by the name of Nineveh and its connection with the Sumerian goddess Nin or Nina, possibly a form of Ishtar.117.2And in the inscription of Sargon giving the names of the eight doors of his palace, all named after deities, Ninib is described as the god “who lays the ground-stone of the city for eternity”;117.3also we find designations of particular cities, as the city of such-and-such a deity.117.4Finally, it may be worth noting in this direction that Nusku the fire-god, who lights the sacrifices, is called “the City-Founder, the Restorer of Temples.”117.5
The evidence of Anatolia is late, but it tells the same story: Sir William Ramsay has emphasised theimportance for early political history of such names as Hieroupolis, the City of the Temple, developing into Hierapolis, the Holy City.118.1In Hellas the evidence is fuller and older of the religious origin of some, at least, of the πόλεις, for some of the old names reveal the personal name or the appellative of the divinity. Such are Athenai (the settlements of Athena); Potniai, “the place of the revered ones”; Alalkomenai, “the places of Athena Alalkomene”; Nemea, “the sacred groves of Zeus”; Megara, probably “the shrines of the goddess of the lower world”; Diades, Olympia and others. The reason of such development is not hard to seek: the temple would be the meeting-place of many consanguineous tribes, and its sanctuary would safeguard intertribal markets, and at the same time demand fortification and attract a settlement. Mecca, the holy city of Arabia in days long before and after Islam, had doubtless this origin.118.2We have traces of the same phenomenon in our English names: Preston, for instance, showing the growth of a city out of a monastery. In the later history of Hellenism the religious origin of the πόλεις is still more frequently revealed by its name: the god who leads the colonists to their new home gives his name to the settlement; hence the very numerous “Apolloniai.”
But though it is not permissible to dogmatise about the origin of the great cities in the valley of the Euphrates, we have ample material supplied by Babylonian-Assyrian monuments and texts of the close interdependence of Church and State, to illustrate what I remarked upon in my inaugural lecture, the political character of the pantheon. This emerges most clearly when we considerthe relations of the monarch to the deity. Of all Oriental autocracies, it may be said with truth that the instinctive bias of the people to an autocratic system is a religious instinct: the kingship is of the divine type of which Dr. Frazer has collected the amplest evidence. And this was certainly the type of the most ancient kingship that we can discover in the Mesopotamian region. The ancient kings of the Isin dynasty dared to speak of themselves as “the beloved consort of Nana.”119.1But more usually the king was regarded as the son or fosterling of the divinity, though this dogma need not have been given a literal interpretation, nor did it clash with the well-established proof of a secular paternity. An interesting example is the inscription of Samsuilina, the son of Hammurabi, who was reigning perhaps as early as the latter part of the third millennium:119.2the king proclaims, “I built the wall in Nippur in honour of the goddess Nin, the walls of Padda to Adad my helper, the wall of Lagab to Sin the god, my begetter.” The tie of the foster-child was as close as that of actual sonship; and Assurbanipal is regarded as the foster-child of the goddess of Nineveh. Nebo himself says to him in that remarkable conversation between the god and the king that an inscription has preserved,119.3“weak wast thou, O Assurbanipal, when thou sattest on the lap of the divine Queen of Nineveh, and didst drink from her four breasts.” Similarly, the early King Lugalzaggisi declares that he was nourished by the milk of the goddess Ninharsag, and King Gudea mentions Nina as his mother.119.4In an oracle of encouragementgiven by the goddess Belit to Assurbanipal, she speaks to him thus, “Thou whom Belit has borne, do not fear.”120.1
Now a few isolated texts might be quoted to suggest that this idea of divine parentage was not confined to the kings, but that even the private Babylonian might at times rise to the conception that he was in a sense the child of God. At least in one incantation, in which Marduk is commissioned by Ea to heal a sick man, the man is called “the child of his god”;120.2and Ishtar is often designated “the Mother of Gods and men” and the source of all life on the earth, human, animal, and vegetative.120.3But the incantation points only to a vague spiritual belief that might be associated with a general idea that all life is originally divine. We may be sure that the feeling of the divine life of the king was a much more real and living belief than was any sense that the individual might occasionally cherish of his own celestial origin. The king and the god were together the joint source of law and order. The greatest of the early Babylonian dynasts, Lugalzaggisi, whose reign is dated near to 4000 B.C., styles himself the vicegerent (Patesi) of Enlil, the earth-god of Nippur;120.4and in early Babylonian contracts, oath was taken in the names both of the god and the king.120.5Hammurabi converses with Shamash and receives the great code from his hands, even as Moses received the law from Jahwé or Minos from Zeus. Did any monument ever express so profoundly the divine origin of the royal authority and the State institutions as the famousShamash relief?121.1It is the gods who endow Hammurabi with his various mental qualities: he himself tells us so in his code, “Marduk sent me to rule men and to proclaim Righteousness to the world”;121.2and he speaks similarly of the sun-god Shamash: “At the command of Shamash, the great Judge of Heaven and Earth, shall Righteousness arise up in the land.”121.3He proclaims himself, therefore, the political prophet of the Lord; and curses with a portentous curse any one who shall venture to abolish his enactments. The later Assyrian kings have the same religious confidence: Sargon (B.C. 722-705) proclaims that he owes his penetrating genius to Ea, “the Lord of Wisdom,” and his understanding to the “Queen of the crown of heaven.”121.4We find them also, the Assyrian kings, consulting the sun-god by presenting to him tablets inscribed with questions as to their chances of success in a war, or the fitness and loyalty of a minister whom they proposed to appoint.121.5
And this religion affords a unique illustration of the intimacy of the bond between the king as head of the State and the divine powers. The gods are the rulers of destiny: and in the Hall of Assembly at Esagila each year the Council of the Gods under the presidency of Nebo fixed the destiny of the king and the Empire for the ensuing year.121.6This award must have signified the writing down of oracles concerning the immediate future, and no doubt the questions were prepared by the king and the priests. The good kingwho was devoted to the service of the gods was glorified by the priesthood in much the same terms as are applied in the Old Testament to the king who was devoted to the service of Jahwé: in the cult-inscription of Sippar in the British Museum,122.1Nabupaladdin, who reigned 884-860 B.C., and who re-established the cult of Shamash, is praised by the priest as “the called of Marduk, the darling of Anu and Ea, the man wholly after the heart of Zarpanit.”
The king, then, is the head of the church, himself a high-priest, as Gudea was high-priest of Ningirsu, and as the Assyrian kings described themselves as the priests of Asshur, the professional priesthood serving as their expert advisers and ministers. Was he actually worshipped in his life? This is maintained by some Assyriologists, and certain evidence points to the practice. In the conversation between Nebo and Assurbanipal, to which reference has been made, the god promises to the king, “I will raise up thy head and erect thy form in the temple of Bit-Mashmash”;122.2the names of old Babylonian kings are marked with the ideogram of divinity, and Professor Jastrow122.3mentions an inscription of the fourth millennium B.C. in which Gudea ordains sacrifices to his own statues. A document is quoted by Mr. Johns,122.4recording the dedication of a piece of land by a private citizen “for his life,” that is to say, to bring a blessing on himself, to the King Lugalla who is called a god, and to his consort. But Zimmern122.5considers that the direct deification of kings was a practice of the earliest period only, and was never pushed so far as it was in Egypt.There is reason to suppose that the king or patesi who controlled Nippur had alone the right to be deified, Nippur being the original centre of the Sumerian religion.123.1
The sacred character of the king implied that he could exercise miraculous functions or put forth divine “mana” on behalf of his people. We find him in the earlier period reciting incantations in the dark of the moon to avert evil from the land.123.2One of the kings of the dynasty of Ur assumed the title “the exorciser of the holy tree of Eridu,” which may point to certain magic functions performed by the king on the sacred tree.123.3
This political aspect of religion appears pronounced also in other early communities of the Semitic race; the high god or goddess is the head of the State; the people of Moab are the sons and daughters of Chemosh; the goddess of Askalon and Sidon wears the mural crown. And doubtless the early Semitic kingship was of the same sacred character elsewhere as in Mesopotamia. The King of Moab on the Mesha Stone calls himself the son of Chemosh; and Ben-Hadad, King of Damascus, is the son of Hadad.123.4In the Aramaic inscription found at Sinjerli,123.5the gods Hadad, El-Reschef, and Shamash are regarded as special protectors of the kings. One of the last kings of Sidon, Tabnit, in the inscription on his sarcophagus, places his priestly office before his royal title, “I, Tabnit, priest of Astarte, King of the Sidonians.”123.6King of Byblos or Gobal, inthe fifth century B.C., regards himself as called to his high office by the Baalat, the goddess of the State, and prays that she may bless him and give him length of days “because he is a just king”:124.1and mention has already been made of Phoenician monuments showing the King of Sidon seated with Astarte and embraced by her. The claim to actual godship may have really been made by the King of Tyre, as the prophet Ezekiel twice reproaches him with the blasphemy: “Thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the Seat of God, in the midst of the Seas.”124.2
The Hittite monuments and the text of the Hittite treaty with Rameses II. reveal a religion of the same political type. The gods are not only witnesses to the political contract, but the great Hittite god of heaven puts his own seal to it; and the last few lines of the text contain a careful description of that seal, which reveals the sacrosanct character of the Hittite kingship; for the design chosen was a group of the god and the Hittite king whom he is embracing. The same significance belongs to certain scenes in the great relief of Boghaz-Keui: on one of the slabs we discern an armed god with his arm round the neck and his hand grasping the hand of a smaller figure, whose emblem and dress suggest a sacerdotal rather than a royal personality. But the happy coincidence of the description in the Hittite-Egyptian treaty proves that this is no mere priest, but a Hittite King124.3of sacred function and semi-divinecharacter in affectionate union with his god; it suggests also a date not far from the thirteenth century for the Boghaz-Keui relief; and it makes unnecessary and improbable the mystic explanation of this scene that Dr. Frazer has ventured.125.1At this early period of the Hittite empire, the kingship may not yet have been detached from the priesthood; even later at Comana, in the same country of Cappadocia, the priests and the kings were drawn from the same stock.125.2One more detail bearing perhaps on the present subject may be noted in this monument at Boghaz-Keui: the goddess wears a crenelated cap, that reminds us somewhat of the later mural or turreted crown borne by Cybele and Astarte. May we suppose that this was the origin of those, and had the same political significance?
Again, it may be noted that in Phrygia itself, the land of the goddess, we have vague evidence in the legend of Midas that the early kings called by that name were regarded as the sons of Kybele.125.3
As regards the Minoan-Mycenaean religion and its relation to the State, the excavations on the site of Knossos suggest that there at least the whole of the state-cult was in the hands of the kings; for no public temples have been found, but only shrines in the palaces. This is the strongest proof of the sacral power of the Minoan ruler, and we can well believe that he was deified after his death; nor need we wholly discredit that vague statement of Tzetzes that the old kings of Crete were given the divine name of Zeus [Δίες].125.4There is value, then, in Homer’s picture of Minos as the friend of God who holds converse with him.
The political significance of Greek religion impresses itself upon us at a thousand points and under endless aspects. The deity belongs not to the individual but to the tribe; and as in the earliest Hellenic period the tribes were conscious of a certain community of blood, their earliest religion appears at many points to have transcended the tribal limits, and certain deities have developed a national character. Now evidence—vague and legendary, it is true, but valuable when compared with the facts of other communities—compels us to conceive of the early Hellenic kings having the same character as those that we have observed in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Crete; Homer regards them as the god-born, who can exercise religious functions, whose decrees have the force of θέμις. The fire that burnt on their hearth was sacred and embodied the life of the community; and in the later period the perpetual fire that was maintained in the Prytaneum of the πόλις represented the ancient sacred hearth-fire of the king.126.1Also, when the monarchy was generally abolished, many of the cities felt compelled to retain the title of βασιλεύς for the priest who carried on the religious functions as the shadow of the ancient priest-king. But these similar phenomena are of little ethnographic value. Primitive Hellenism was in these respects only maintaining its own inherited traditions, and following the same lines of early social evolution as those of other communities. On the other hand, the distinctness of developed Hellenism is the secular independence of its intellect; and even in its earliestmythic period we can believe that the divine character of the Basileus was less impressively felt, his association with the divinity less intimate, than was the case in Mesopotamia. Neither Agamemnon nor his predecessors would speak, we may be sure, with the same astonishing self-consciousness of their divine inspiration as the earliest and later kings of Babylon and Assyria.
Returning to the Mesopotamian societies, we find much other evidence of the dependence of State-institutions upon cult and religious ideas. Justice and the integrity of the Law were virtues consecrated by old Babylonian religion. One of the most striking of the Shamash hymns exhibits the sun-god as the guardian of right judgment—“the wicked judge thou makest to behold bondage—him who receives not a bribe, who has regard to the weak, shall be well-pleasing to Shamash, he shall prolong his life”: “Shamash hates those who falsify boundaries and weights.”127.1The respect for the rights of property to which the latter phrase alludes, was maintained by the force of religious sanctions. The King Asurbanipal declares that he has restored to the Babylonians their fields that had been wrongfully taken away, “for fear of Bel and Nebo.”127.2A number of inscribed Babylonian boundary-stones have been found with symbols of the various high gods carved upon them, with invocations in their name to deter trespassers, or those who would remove their neighbour’s landmark.127.3One of these is marked with a curse as follows:127.4“May Ninib, the Lord of Boundaries, deprive him ofhis son the water-pourer”—meaning that the man who violates the boundaries shall leave no son behind him to perform the funeral rites. Probably other examples of this practice are to be found in non-Hellenic Asia Minor; at present I can only quote one, a late Phrygian inscription, which, however, may testify to an early Phrygian religious function, on a slab with the divine name Ὁροφύλαξ, “Boundary-guardian,” inscribed beneath a carved relief-figure of the god Men bearing a club.128.1In Greece, as is well known, religion contributed the same aid to the evolution of the law of private property in land; the boundary is put under the protection of Zeus Ὅριος, a power similar to the Latin Jupiter Terminus, or of Hermes Ἑπιτέρμαιος.128.2In this function they are regarded as nether-deities, whose divinity is latent in the soil. But though Hellas may have borrowed from Babylon its system of land-measurement, it did not need to borrow this religious idea and practice. For these are widespread over the world: in the Teutonic north the rights of the owner were sanctified by carrying holy fire from the hearth round the boundary; and in savage modern societies by the use of the terrible weapon of the tabu and by the erection of fetiches on the boundary mark which serve as ἀποτρόπαια.128.3We have here a salient example of religion as a constructive force in framing a great social institution, while the motive desire is secular and purely human.
But we must not, I think, hope to be able to trace with any exactness the part played by religion in constructing the various departments of the social fabricof Babylonia; for when we get our first glimpse of that society it is already so far advanced, so complex in its civilisation, in a sense so modern, that its embryology is likely to escape us. Nevertheless, it is interesting for our purpose to study the earliest material, the code of Hammurabi, to watch what light it throws on the correlation of religious and secular life.
Some parts of it are missing, but we may be allowed to pass a temporary judgment on that which is preserved, and which appears to be the greater part of the whole corpus.129.1The code, as I have mentioned, is inspired by the god, safeguarded by the god, and the legislation is in that sense theocratic; but as compared, for instance, with the Jewish books of the Law, it impresses us as the work of a cool-headed lawyer, of secular utilitarian principles, bringing legal acumen to bear on the problems of a complex society. At certain points it is still on the barbaric plane: the principle of “an eye for an eye” is enacted; the sense of individual responsibility for wrong-doing is not yet so far developed but that vicarious punishment is still allowed; a man’s son or daughter might be put to death for his own offence. But in many respects it reveals an advanced moral and intellectual view, and the religious atmosphere is absent where we should most expect to find an infusion of it. In the enactments dealing with the fees due to a physician, we seem to discern that medicine has become a free and secular science. Still more important for our purpose are the clauses concerning homicide, for it is particularly in regard to homicide that religious feeling has been most operative in theearly legislation of society, and the evolution of our modern morality concerning this offence has been at times retarded by religion. Only one clause in the code happens to deal with deliberate murder, and only murder in special circumstances, those in which Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon: Hammurabi would have impaled Clytemnestra: a few other clauses are concerned with culpable homicide and unintentional. Hammurabi being himself a master-builder, is severe with bad architects who build houses so weakly that they fall in and kill the owners: in such a case he kills the architect. But he is singularly equitable and mild with a man who is drawn into a quarrel in which blows are passed, and who unthinkingly wounds or kills his opponent; if he can take an oath that he acted “without knowledge or without will,” he has only to pay the physician if the man is wounded, and half a mina of silver if the man is killed and was of free birth. Here there is no mention of the blood-feud, and Babylonian society seems wholly to have escaped from that dangerous principle of tribal barbarism.130.1Neither is there any hint of the inherent impurity of all bloodshed, whatever is the manner of the shedding; and it seems that this society was no longer in bondage to that religious feeling, to which our modern moral sense concerning murder is in many ways indebted, but which is often obstructive of legal and ethical progress, and which coloured so deeply the early Judaic and Hellenic law of homicide. Further, we note that Hammurabi’s code has come to allow the consideration of motivesand extenuating circumstances; and in this vital respect it ranks with modern civilised legislation. Between such a society and the proto-Hellenic community, at least in regard to the view of homicide, there was a great gulf fixed.
But for the present let us pursue the code further. Another crime that early society regards with religious horror, and of which religion always takes cognisance, is incest. The enactments of the code deal only with three cases: incest with daughter, mother, and stepmother; in the first, the sinner is driven from the land, probably into perpetual exile; in the second, both parties are burned alive; in the third, he is merely driven from the paternal house. The first two punishments reveal, I think, religious feeling, stronger in the second case than in the first: the sinner pollutes the land, therefore the pollution must be purged by his flight, or when most deadly must be purged away by fire; for execution by burning had often the religious significance of a holocaust. Still it is only by surmise that we detect religious colour in the code at this point: in fact, it emerges clearly only in a few clauses. We note that the code allows of expurgation by oath-taking; so did the early Greeks and our own forefathers, and the practice is not distinctive of any particular people or group. The code allows the ordeal in certain cases, as did the Greek, and as probably every community has done at a certain stage of religious feeling; also civilised Babylon countenanced trials for witchcraft, and enacted a similar water-ordeal to that which prevailed in England till fairly recent times.
One clause is of interest as showing that Hammurabi was not afraid of any opposition from the priesthood if he wished to tax Church property; for he enacts thatthe ransom of his captured feudal followers (about whom he is particularly thoughtful) “shall be paid out of the property of the temple nearest to the place where they were taken prisoners.”132.1But the most interesting part of the code from the religious point of view, are the enactments concerning a class of women who are devoted to the service of religion, sisters or wives, as they are here called, of Marduk: but it will be more convenient to consider these later on when the question of ritual is dealt with.
Apart from this great document, I do not know if further evidence is forthcoming of the precise influence of religion on the social system of Babylonia. The two spheres may once have been closely interdependent; but we can see from the earliest legal contracts that law had already freed itself from religion in the main; the judge is a secular authority;132.2the scribe who draws up the contracts is a professional notary, and it is not clear that he had any necessary connection with the temples;132.3we only hear of certain elders who assisted the judge, many of whom were temple officials or members of the guild of Shamash votaries;132.4also, we find trials taking place in the temples, especially the temple of Shamash at Sippara, where the legal judgment was called “the judgment of Shamash in the house of Shamash.”132.5Much light has yet to come, no doubt, from Babylon, and new light perhaps from Anatolia, to illuminate the part played by religion in the evolution of society. We would wish to know more concerning the religious side of family institutions, whether, for instance, there was any direct cult of the family hearth to which the Hellenes owed so much. Robertson Smith definitely denies thatany of the Semitic races knew of such an institution; and he is very probably right, for it belongs more naturally to the colder climates, where the fixed and carefully placed hearth is a necessary centre of the dwelling-room, than to the hotter, where the inhabitants could be content in winter with a movable brazier. Yet one text at least may be cited to prove, if rightly interpreted, that the hearth could be occasionally deified in a Babylonian liturgy; for in a hymn to Nusku the fire-god, which contains a litany of absolution from sins, we find the phrase, “May the hearth of the house deliver you and absolve you,”133.1but the same litany speaks also of the canals as deified. And we may value these two examples of that polydaimonism to which we could find parallels in early Hellas. But this evidence does not point to any established and regulated hearth-worship which might serve as the religious bond of family morality. More than one inscription, however, attests the worship of a family house-god (ilu-biti), to whom it seems a small domestic chapel was consecrated.133.2Similarly, we have in Hellas Zeus Ἑρκεῖος and Ζεὺς Κτήσιος. And the Babylonian ilu-biti is mentioned, in association with a divinity of the street, ila-sûki,—a name which reminds us of Apollo Ἀγυιεύς. Only, these household and street-divinities in Babylon may have been mere “daimones” rather than θεοί; nor is it clear whether these family cults were ancestral, the heritage of a particular clan, or whether they were merely consecrated to the personal protective deity of the householder, or what part they played in the family organisation, for instance, in themarriage-ceremonies, births, and adoptions. So far as I have been able to study them, the Babylonian litanies and hymns seem rarely to reflect the religious side of the family life134.1; they are prompted by the needs of the city and the empire, or by the emotional crises of the individual soul. The legal contracts preserved on the brick tablets throw some light on the forms of the marriage ceremony, which appears to have been performed usually in a registration-office rather than a church. There must surely have been also some religious side to it; but the only evidence, so far as I am aware, is a very curious and doubtful document that has been published by Dr. Pinches, containing details of a religious ceremony which appears to be part of a bridal.134.2I will not quote the quaint and bizarre formulae, as the renderings are said to be highly conjectural: if they prove correct, one may judge that the service belongs to a highly advanced religion; but I cannot adduce any parallel to it from other peoples. As for the ritual or religious feeling connected with adoption or birth, I am not aware that the documents have so far disclosed anything: it is stated vaguely by Peiser, in his sketch of Babylonian society, that adoption at Babylon might be prompted by a religious motive, namely, by the desire of the childless parents to have an heir who might continue the ancestor-worship of the family. But no document is quoted in proof of this; and it is very doubtful if we ought to speak of Babylonian ancestor-worship.134.3We may suspect that the writer has been misled by thewell-known facts of Vedic, Hellenic, and Roman family cult.
In this, as in other respects, we may feel how advanced, modern and secular, was Babylonian society. No trace has appeared as yet of the tribal or phratric system; the family is the unit of the State, but individualism is much developed.
On the other hand, the function of religion as a constructive force in early Greek society, in the evolution of tribal and intertribal law, is more obvious and transparent, for in this land we are fortunate enough to catch glimpses of civilised society in its making, which are denied to us in Mesopotamia. Hellenic religion penetrated every domain and department of Hellenic life to an even greater degree than did Babylonian religion the society of Babylon. And yet the Greek mind as it develops becomes pronouncedly secular, at least in comparison with the Oriental. The contradiction is only apparent. The Hellene used religion as an instrument for constructing his social order, for utilitarian ends, as a serviceable minister that could rarely, and never for long, establish a tyranny. He even used it to assist and glorify his sports, yet he varied and arranged these according to his pleasure. The detrimental tendency of religion to petrify custom was less marked in his midst than elsewhere; as usual, it often lagged behind in the progress of the race, yet it followed the progress on the whole, and often assisted it.
I cannot here give a detailed account of the social functions of Greek religion; and some of its more interesting phenomena I have tried to analyse in detail in myHibbert Lecturesand in various chapters of myCults: one of the most important of the special questions, the social or political influence of the cults of ancestors,entered into the course that I delivered last year. I will only attempt here a brief indication of the salient facts that will repay special study, confining myself as far as possible to those that belong to the proto-Hellenic period. Our knowledge, of course, of the relation of religion to the social order of life, law, and morality in the second millennium in Greece, is only dim and hypothetical: here and there Homer affords us glimpses; for the rest, we have legends and cult evidence which must be carefully and tactfully used. I have already touched on the religious character of the ancient kingship, and the evidence of the religious origin of some of the Hellenic πόλεις. It is probable that some of the deities had already in the proto-Hellenic period a political character, as deities of the assembly or the “agora.” Thus Apollo Ἀγυιεύς, at first a divine leader of the invasion, becomes, when the conquerors settle on the land, at once a divinity of the city; and some scholars would derive his very name from the ἀπέλλα, the political assembly. In order to ensure the settlement and development of law, the debates and judgments in the market-place must be secured from armed disturbance such as frequently threatened the peace of the Icelandic Thing: therefore, in pre-Homeric days the market-place was consecrated as a holy place, and the elders who give judgment “hold in their hands the sceptres of clear-voiced heralds.”136.1These words probably refer to the κηρύκειον, the badge of Hermes, the god of the market-place, which as a religious amulet confers inviolability on the bearer. The same fetich-badge, giving security to the herald and ambassador, assisted the development of international law; and the only spiritual sanction of treatiesand covenants with other communities was a religious one, the force of the oath sworn and the ordeal-ritual which accompanied the conclusion of a treaty or contract. The temple on the borderland of different tribes served as a secure place for intertribal intercourse, commercial and festive, and might become the centre of an Amphictyony, or federal union of tribes. The constitution of the Delphic Amphictyony points back to the proto-Hellenic period. The oracles were beginning in the second millennium to play a political part, as they did with greater effect in the first. For Zeus was already at Dodona, and Apollo, the political godpar excellence, at Pytho.
Our indications are slight and dim; but the poet of theOdysseyseems to be aware that an ὀμφή or oracular deliverance might be used to dethrone a royal dynasty.137.1The dedication of a tithe of the captives taken in war to Apollo was a custom connected with the earliest settlements and migration, for Apollo disposed of his captives by colonising them on some vacant land. The practice appears to have been a very early one, for this is the legend of the pre-Dorian settlement of the Dryopes in the Peloponnese;137.2also there is evidence for the institution in pre-historic Greece of that religious system of colonisation which the Latins called the Ver Sacrum.137.3In fact, the religion of Apollo, especially the common worship of Apollo Πυθαεύς, served more than any other cult as a bond of connection between the independent communities already—I believe—in pre-Homeric days; and to this earliest epoch may belong that interesting ritual of the Hyperborean offerings brought by sacrosanct Hellenic pilgrims down from the north along the primeval routes of the Aryan immigration.137.4
The narrower systems of family and phratry tell the same story of the constructive power of religion. The primitive grouping into septs and phratries and tribal subdivisions, of which the traces are not yet discovered in the civilisation of Babylon, has left its deep imprint on historic Greek society; and religion is intimately interwoven with the domestic and phratric cults, not only in that these are much concerned with worship of heroes and ancestors, but that the high divinities also, Zeus Φράτριος, Athena Φρατρία and Ἀπατουρία, take these institutions under their charge. Hence all adoptions and admissions of new members into the phratry had to be performed at the altar. The marriage ceremony was a religious ritual—in Attica, at least, a religious communion like the Roman Confarreatio,138.1and the mutual duties of parents and children, kinsmen and tribesmen, were consecrated by the early ideas concerning the divine nature.138.2
A festival such as the Ἀπατούρια, instituted to cement a social organisation, and to all appearances of great antiquity, has nothing like it in the Babylonian festival calendar, so far as I am aware; and again, to the many political and social titles of the Hellenic divinities such as Πολιεύς, Ἀγοραῖος, Πάνδημος, Βουλαῖος, it would be hard to find parallels in the cult-terminology of Babylon.
In considering a religion under its social or legal aspects, the laws concerning homicide will often yield telling evidence. There is a whole aeon of development dividing the code of Hammurabi and the Homeric and pre-Homeric theory in this matter. The Babylonian had arrived, as we have seen,138.3in some indefinitelyearly period at the conception of murder as a crime against the whole State, at what we may call the advanced secular point of view. In Greece that conception is post-Homeric: the Homeric and pre-Homeric societies were still in the stage of law in which homicide is treated as a private affair of the kinsmen, a matter to be settled by the blood-feud or weregild. Only in certain cases it was a sin, namely, when the slain person was a suppliant or a kinsman. The religious feeling in respect of the first partly arises from the old Aryan Hearth-worship;139.1in respect of the second, it is associated with a primitive tribal horror of shedding kindred blood: and, though the feeling of the religious sanctity of the guest, the suppliant, and the kinsman was strong in Semitic communities, I cannot find any special Babylonian cult that is analogous to that of Zeus Μειλίχιος, or Ἱκέσιος, or Ξένιος. I have traced elsewhere the development in the ninth and eighth centuries of the more civilised legislation concerning homicide in Greece, and I have tried to indicate the precise part played by religion in aiding the evolution:139.2to get to the facts one must specially study the worship of Athena and Apollo. I have connected it with a growing sense of the impurity of bloodshed, which might express itself in a definite religious way, as fear of the ghost or of the offended deity. It is open to us to explain this increased sensitiveness concerning purity as a mark of Oriental influence, which was reaching Greece in the first millennium B.C. But at least we ought not to derive it from Mesopotamia until we find evidence of purifications from bloodshed as a common ritual in Babylonian religion, and the impurity of bloodshed an underlyingprinciple of the Babylonian law of murder. But, as we have seen, we discern here only the secular result: the religious force that may have worked towards it is too far removed in the background of the past. Summarily, we must conclude that the political application of Hellenic religion seems wholly a native and independent product of the Hellenic spirit, and reflected the characteristically Hellenic forms of civic life.
Thecomparison must also consider the relation in these various societies between religion and morality, both social and individual. From this point of view, as we are dealing with the second millennium only, it must be a comparison mainly between the Mesopotamian and the Hellenic; for except for a few Hittite letters that reveal little, there is no evidence concerning our races of the west of Asia Minor, since monuments can scarcely be direct witnesses concerning ethics; at least, the Asia Minor monuments are not, and we must await the further discovery and interpretation of Hittite literature. For the proto-Hellenic period also, it may be said, we have no explicit and direct evidence. But we have Homer, whose poems belong to the end of that period and the beginning of the second; and we cannot suppose that the average morality that they represent had all grown up in the century before them, still less that Homer had discovered it as an original teacher. Therefore, cautiously and critically handled, his poems throw some light on the moral facts of the centuries behind them. There is also some evidence to be gleaned from the rich field of Greek mythology and cult; only we must realise that we rarely can determine the date of the rise of an old Hellenic legend or the institution of an old Hellenic cult. The Mesopotamian evidence,then, is direct and explicit, depending solely on the right interpretation of documents; the Hellenic evidence concerning the earliest period is indirect and often hypothetical.
A careful study of all the sources will allow this induction, that the deities of this period in both societies are on the side of whatever morality is current, inspiring it, protecting it, and avenging the breach of it; we are dealing, in fact, with a religion of personal moral powers. Concerning the Mesopotamian, this is a trite observation to make; the most superficial glance of a few hymns confirms it. Shamash is the great god of justice, the protector of the weak; Enlil “destroyeth the evil-minded”;142.1Ishtar judges the cause according to right—she maintains the right of the oppressed and the downcast; Righteousness and Judgment are the sons of Shamash. Ga-tum-duga, “she who produces good,” is an appellative of Bau.142.2And yet this is not the whole account. The destructive and evil character of some of the deities in Mesopotamia occasionally appears in the hymns, and is expressed apparently in certain titles. This might be the case at times when those deities are addressed that were powers of death and the lower world; for instance, Nergal, the lord of destruction; Isum, a little-known deity to whom a phrase is attached that is said to mean “the exalted murderer.”142.3And this might be explained by the fact that these powers personified, as it were, the baneful forces of nature, or, as perhaps in the case of Martu, whom Jeremias cites as one of the evil gods, were aliens.142.4We find also the name of an obscure deity, “Ira,” who was a god of pestilence, and at times identified with Nergal;143.1but that a direct cult was attached to him in this baneful character is not shown. And it is unlikely that any Babylonian deity was worshipped definitely as an evil power: moral speculation could always explain the evil that he appeared to work as a punishment for sin or as righteous vengeance on the enemy; that is to say, the evil element becomes moralised, and the worshipper is always convinced that the god can become good to him. Thus in the same context Nergal is called the “Lord of Destruction,” and yet he is “the god of the little ones, he of the beneficent visage.”143.2The dark storm-god Adad, before whose wrath the high gods rise up in terror, the pitiless one, can yet be implored as “the merciful among the great gods.”143.3This transformation, by which a destructive nature-power could become a benevolent being, follows a law of religious psychology, which expresses itself in the quasi-magical phraseology of prayer. The worshipper wishes to get some good from his deity or some mercy: therefore he calls him good and merciful, feeling that such spell-words constrain the god to be so; and belief will arise from the continual repetition of formulae. Therefore, by the time our record begins, all the deities that the Babylonian and Assyrian worshipped are beneficent on the whole: the Epic of Creation supposes the existence of primeval bad powers, but these had been conquered, and some pardoned, by Marduk. The evil personal agencies that remained active were demons, and thesewere not worshipped, but exorcised or averted by the good gods.144.1
And this may serve as a fairly accurate description of the moral character of Greek religion at that stage of development where Homer presents it to us. The high deities are worshipped on the whole as moral beings and as beneficent: that is, as the guardians of the social morality of the period, whatever that was. The usual popular writer does not perceive this, because he is always liable to the error of confusing mythology with worship, and supposing that if the mythology is licentious or immoral, the deity is worshipped in that character. All students of mythology and religion are aware that this is false. We might be able to show that the religious imagination and statement of Homer at times fall below the level of contemporary cult, at times rise above it. At any rate, he is evidently addressing a world of religious-minded people, who impute their own moral ideals to their highest divinities, especially to their high god Zeus. Νέμεσις, the social feeling of indignation which is at the psychic basis of social morality, is the common emotion excited both in gods and men by the same acts; and though much of Greek religion was still not yet penetrated with morality, the higher personal gods were generally regarded as on the side of righteousness. One or two Greek myths, such as that of Prometheus, as Hesiod narrates it, might suggest that the deity was not necessarily conceived as the friend, but sometimes even as the enemy, of man. But Hesiod’s narrative does not strike us as primitive orpopular; and, at any rate, such a view is inconsistent with the earliest stage of worship that we can discover or surmise. The poets and philosophers might dislike Ares; but the Hellenes, who worshipped him, did not worship him as an evil god, with apotropaeic rites: nor is it proved or likely that any deity to whom actual service was paid, was regarded as in his nature maleficent by his worshippers. The dread powers of the lower world were also givers of vegetation. The Erinyes had scarcely a recorded cult, and their wrath was moralised as righteous indignation; nor was ghost-cult, when it arose, merely a service of terror and aversion. It is a striking confirmation of the view here expressed, that among the very long list of cult-appellatives attached to the Greek divinities, some of which have a moral value, there are only two doubtful examples of an evil connotation attaching to the word.145.1
We may affirm generally, then, that the Mesopotamian and Hellenic religions are more or less on the same level of thought in respect of the moral and beneficent character of the deities. But careful study of the Hellenic will give us the impression that the terrible and destructive power of divinity is far less emphasised by cult than it was in the Eastern Semitic world. Every deity might be dangerous if neglected, and certainly would be if insulted. The idea of the “jealous god” is non-moral, and can easily become immoral: that is, it tends to divorce the conception of the divine character from the purely human moral ideal. And this idea is palpable not only in the Hellenic and Mesopotamian, but still more in the Judaic religion, and our own religion is not yet delivered from it. But apartfrom this, the Hellenic imagination, so far as we can discern it, even in its infancy, did not construct manifold forms of fear out of the dangerous powers in the nature-world, and worship them with the higher forms of cult. We do not come upon aboriginal thunder gods and storm godsper se(I use the term “god” advisedly): Zeus the thunderer had been civilised and moralised before Homer’s time. Poseidon had always his wild side as god of storms and earthquakes; and to the end he remains rather more a non-moral nature-power than the others; but destructive force was certainly not the centre of his personality, and in the pre-historic days he had become the father of the Minyan and Ionic people, and the guardian of their family life. The wind-powers might develop into beneficent gods or ancestors; or might occasionally be regarded from the lower standpoint of polydaimonism, and averted by magical means. The higher Hellenic religion did not admit such beings as “Ira,” the god of pestilence, or a special god of storms or earthquakes, and it is far less than the Babylonian a religion of fear. This difference will emerge more clearly in the study of ritual.
One more difference strikes us in comparing the ethical character of the two religions. The Greek high divinity is a moral being, but not every divinity was moralised to such an extent as were the higher powers of Mesopotamia. A few Hellenic deities remain ethically undeveloped and crude, Ares, for instance, and in a certain sense Hestia. A salient example is the contrast between the fire-god Hephaistos and the Babylonian-Sumerian Nusku or Girru.146.1Both are elemental powers of fire, both are therefore concerned with the arts of metalwork; but Hephaistos remains a handicraftsman, andhas little or nothing to do with moral life; whereas the Babylonian deity acquires an exalted moral and spiritual character. Dionysos becomes a most potent force in the later Hellenic world; yet an irrepressible vein of wildness and a spirit that refuses to conform to the ethical ideal of Hellas remains in him. A god so highly placed at Babylon would have been clothed with moral attributes in many an ecstatic phrase of temple liturgy.
It would be interesting to go more into detail concerning the special moral virtues consecrated by the two religions, or the various moral attributes specially attributed to the divinities. Such a study would demand two long treatises on Greek and Babylonian ethics. I have only time and power to indicate here a few points. The peoples of the old world show many general points of resemblance with each other in their moral ideas, and as compared with ourselves many salient points of difference. And moral statistics have rarely any value for proving the influence of one race upon another. As the Babylonian society was more complex in the second millennium than was the Hellenic, so must its morality have been; but it will not be found futile from the point of view of our main purpose to compare the two in respect of some special virtues, as we have already compared them incidentally in regard to the ideas about homicide.
The idea of the sin of perjury belongs to the earliest stage of religious ethic, and is the starting-point of much moral evolution. It is magical in its origin; for the oath-taker enters into communion with the divinity, by touching some sacred object or eating sacred food charged with divine power, which, being now within him, will blast him if he forswears. This dangerous power becomes interpreted as the angerof the deity by whom the person swears falsely. Hence the belief arose in early Mesopotamia and Greece, and generally in the cults of personal gods, that they punish perjury as a dire offence: such punishment will fall on the community or individual, and often on both: therefore a social moral instinct arises against perjury. This might develop into a moral idea among a progressive people that truthfulness, quite apart from the ritual of the oath, was dear to God in any case, and was therefore a religious virtue. And of this religious virtue attaching to truthfulness, however it came to attach, we have evidence in a Babylonian ritual of confession; before the evil demon can be exorcised, the priest asked certain questions of the penitent, and twice he asks, “Has he said, yea for nay, and nay for yea?”148.1But in no Hellenic record have I ever been able to find a religious parallel to this. The Hellenic religious spirit was most sensitive in respect to perjury, and no religion ever reprobated it more. In regard to ordinary truthfulness, Hellenic religion had nothing to say, no message to give, and Hellenic ethics very little. In the poetic story, Athena smiles on the audacious mendacities of Odysseus, and Hermes loves the liar Autolykos. Not that the religion consecrated mendacity, only it failed to consecrate truth.
It is only the great Achilles who hates with the hate of hell the man who says one thing with his tongue and hides another thing in his heart.148.2This is the voice of northern honour, but it has no religious import.
The ideas connected with perjury have this further value for the history of ethics, that they contributed much to the growth of international morality. It isoften supposed that the earliest morality is merely tribal or clannish, and that in respect of the alien it is nonexistent; but this account of morality is false wherever perjury is found to be a sin. For one great occasion for oath-taking is a treaty or a contract with an alien power. And Homer is our witness that it was considered an immoral act for either Achaeans or Trojans to break their mutual oath. And this early idea of international morality inspires the Tel-El-Amarna correspondence and the Hittite treaty with Rameses. International morality also includes the duty of hospitality, and the pre-Homeric world had developed this moral sense strongly, and no doubt through the aid of religion; the stranger who puts himself into communion with Hestia, the holy hearth, or with Zeus Xenios, has a moral right to protection, and the abduction of Helen was regarded as a sin on the part of Paris against Zeus the god of the guest-right. I have not yet been able to find a cult-concept in Babylonian religion parallel to that of Zeus Xenios, or any reference to hospitality as a sacred duty; yet we know that this was and is as highly regarded by some Semitic races as it ever was by the Hellenic. We may suspect, however, that as Babylonian society was in many respects very modern and complex, the religious sanction of hospitality had decayed.
Looking now at the moral code as regulating the relations of members of the same tribe or community, we cannot doubt that clan-morality was already highly developed in the proto-Hellenic period: the rights and duties of kinsmen are the basis of this morality, and these were consecrated by the worship around the altar of Zeus “in the courtyard,” which may have been a primitive religious gathering-place for the kinsfolk of the early Aryan household. Homer is our first witness for thecult of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος,150.1but it is evident that it had been long in existence before his time. The earliest moral duty that the tie of kinship imposes is the maintenance of peace and goodwill, and as the kindreds grow into a political community, this becomes the basis of political morality and the corner-stone of the religion of the city. The Homeric age, and probably their predecessors, have attained this ethical religious idea; and though Homer is the first to give voice to it, we will not suppose that he discovered it: “outcast from clan, from holy law, and holy hearth is he who longs for bitter battle among the people of his own township.”150.2And to this early age we must also impute the religious morality of the monogamic family: the son fears the curse of the father and of the mother, even of the elder brother: “thou knowest that the powers of judgment defend the right of the elder-born”—Iris says warningly to Poseidon.150.3The Erinyes are specially charged with the preservation of the morality of the family and clan, and with the punishment of the two chief offences against the sacred blood of the kin, murder and incest. Of the first, enough has been said; the religious view of the earliest Greeks concerning the second is first attested by Homer, who mentions “the woes of Oedipus that the Furies of his mother bring to pass for him”;150.4he is thinking more of the incestuous marriage than of the parricide. As regards ordinary adultery, it is only from the later period of Greek literature that we hear protests against it as a sin, though the sentiment of moral indignation against the adulterer is no doubt pre-Homeric. One or two Greek myths that may reflect very early thought express the severe reprobation on the part of the father ofunchastity in his unmarried daughter; myths telling of cruel sentences of death imposed for the offence. But these suggest no religious feeling; the sentiment may well have arisen from the fact that under the patriarchal system the virgin-daughter was the more marriageable and commanded a higher bride-price.
Looking at the code of family and social duties in the ethical religion of Babylon, of which the private penitential hymns and confessional ritual of exorcism are the chief witnesses, we find no figures whose concept and function remind us at all of the Erinyes, the curse-powers on the side of righteousness; but there is evidence in the literature of a family morality more advanced and more articulate than the primitive Greek. Among the sins mentioned in the ritual of confession, alluded to above, those indicated by the following questions are of interest: “Has he caused variance between father and son, mother and daughter, father-in-law and daughter-in-law, brother and brother, friend and friend, partner and partner? Has he conceived hatred against his elder brother, has he despised his father and mother, insulted his elder sister?”151.1All these acts of social misconduct are supposed to give a man into the possession of the evil demon, which must be exorcised before God will admit him to his fellowship again. Though magical ideas are operative in the ceremony, yet we discern here a high religious morality. And among the other moral offences clearly considered as sins in the same formula are such as shedding one’s neighbour’s blood, committing adultery with one’s neighbour’s wife, stealing from one’s neighbour. We find also a certain morality in the matter of property and commerce given a religious sanction in this text: “Thou shalt notremove thy neighbour’s landmark” was a religious law in ancient Babylonian ethics as in our present liturgy; it would appeal to the Hellene who reverenced Zeus Ὅριος; and there are reasons for believing this cult-idea to have been in vogue very early in Greece. The Babylonian code also recognises the sin of using false measure or false coin. And the confessional liturgy agrees in many points with the famous hymn to Shamash, where phrases occur such as “Shamash hates him who falsifies boundaries and weights”; “Shamash hates the adulterer.”152.1It excites our envy also, by stamping as sins certain unpatriotic acts, such as “the spreading a bad report concerning one’s city,” or “bringing one’s city into evil repute.”
We may say, then, that we find a high degree of morality in early Greece, a still higher at a still earlier period in Babylon, and both are obviously indigenous and natural products. And both reveal the phenomenon that marks an early stage of social morality: as the tribe or the family are one flesh, one corporate unit of life, so the members are collectively responsible, and “the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.” This was the familiar law of old Hellas, and we may say of the ancient Mediterranean society; the first to make the momentous protest against it, and to proclaim the responsibility of the individual conscience, was Theognis for the Hellenes and Ezekiel for the Hebrews. The Babylonian, advanced in moral thought as he was, had not escaped the bondage of the older clan-faith: in an incantation-hymn to Marduk,152.2the man who is seeking deliverance prays “may the sins of my father, of my grandfather, my mother, my grandmother, my family,my whole circle of kindred, not come near me, may they depart from my side.”
One other characteristic of early moral thought and feeling is that the sense of sin is not wholly ethical according to our modern criteria, but is partly regarded as something external to the will and purpose, something inherent in certain acts or substances of which the performance or the contagion renders a man a sinner. Thus in the Babylonian confessional liturgy and hymns of penitence, while there is much that would appeal to the most delicate moral consciousness, and is on the same level with the most spiritual passages in the Hebrew psalms, there is also a strong admixture of what is alien and non-moral. The confessional formula153.1asks a man, for instance, “whether he has sat in the chair of a person under a ban,” that is, “a man forbid,” a person impure and under a curse; “whether he has met him, has slept in his bed, has drunk from his cup.” In one of the penitential hymns that might be addressed to any god, “to the god that I know, and to the god that I do not know,” as the formula expresses it, we find such sorrowful confessions as “without knowing it, I have eaten of that which is abominable in the sight of my god: without knowing it, I have trodden on that which is filthy in the sight of my goddess”; “my sins are many, great is my transgression.”153.2This must be taken quite literally: contact with unclean things or with unclean persons, eating of forbidden food, is put in the same category with serious offences against social morality, and all these expose a man equally to the power of the evil demon and to the loss of his God’s protection. And this is a half-civilised development in Babylonian psychology of the primeval savagelaw of tabu: nor, as I think, is there yet any proof that the people of the Mesopotamian culture ever attained to the highest plane of ethical enlightenment; the later Zarathustrian religion of the Persian domination is strongly fettered by this ritualistic morality, in which the distinction between that which is morally wrong and that which is physically unclean, is never clearly apprehended.
This mental attitude is supported in the older and later Mesopotamian system by a vivid polydaimonism; the evil demon is on the alert to destroy the family and the individual; and where the demon is in possession the god departs. As the demon takes advantage of every accidental act, whether conscious or unconscious, the idea arises in the over-anxious spirit that one cannot be sure when or how often one has sinned, and all illness or other misfortune is attributed to some unknown offence.154.1The utterance of the Hebrew psalmist, “who can tell how oft he offendeth: cleanse Thou me from my secret faults,” may express the intense sensitiveness of a very spiritual morality, or it may be merely ritualistic anxiety. This latter is certainly the explanation of the strikingly similar phrases in a Babylonian penitential hymn—“the sins that I have done I know not; the trespass that I have committed I know not.”154.2The feeling of sin is here deep and very moving—“take away from me my wickedness as a cloak… my God, though my sins be seven times seven, yet undo my sins”; yet the context that illustrates this passionate outpouring of the heart, shows that the sin might be such as the accidental stepping on filth. Such ideas, allowed to obsess the mind, easily engender despondency andpessimism; and this tone is heard and once or twice is very marked in some of the most striking products of Babylonian religious poetry; for instance, in the penitential hymn just quoted from, the poet sorrowfully exclaims: “Men are dumb, and of no understanding: all men who live on the earth, what do they understand? Whether they do right, or wrong, they understand nothing.” But the strangest example of this is a lyric of lamentation that reminds us vividly of the book of Job, found in the library of Assurbanipal, and of great antiquity and of wide vogue, as Zimmern shows.155.1It is a masterpiece of the poetry of pessimism: the theme is the sorrow and tribulation of the righteous who has served God faithfully all his life, and feels at the last that he has had no profit of it; and his main thought is expressed in the lines, “If I only knew that such things were pleasing before God; but that which seems good to a man’s self, is evil in the sight of God: and that which according to each man’s sense is to be despised, is good in the sight of his God. Who can understand the counsel of the Gods in heaven? A god’s plan is full of darkness, who hath searched it out?”