CHAPTER VIII.

Religion and Morality.

The deity conceived on the whole as beneficent and righteous, but the divine destructive power more emphasised in Babylonia--Every Babylonian deity moralised, not every Hellenic--In both societies perjury a sin, untruthfulness only in Babylonian religious theory--International morality--The ethics of the family very vital in both societies, but more complex in Babylonia--Ritualistic tabus a heavier burden on the Babylonian conscience--Morality more daimonistic than in Greece--In the Babylonian confessional stress laid on unknown involuntary sin, hence tendency to pessimism--In Greece less timidity of conscience, less prominence of magic--Mercifulness a prominent divine attribute in both religions--More pantheistic thought and a clearer sense of the divinity of all life in Babylonian theology, as in the Tammuz-myth