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. 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