There was, however, behind and beyond all these, another and perhaps a more ancient and more metaphysical conception of God worshipped by all the Semitic peoples of Asia. His name, Il or El, appears to have been for Chaldæans, Assyrians, Canaanites, and for the wandering tribes of the desert, including the progenitors of the chosen people, the generic name for God; and his worship was limited to a distant awful recognition, unprofaned by the rites and sacrifices wherein the nature-gods were approached. Il became a concealed, distant deity, too far off for worship, and too great to be touched by the concerns of men, among those nations with whom the outside aspects of nature grew to be concealers instead of revealers of the Divine; while to the chosen people the name acquired ever new significance, as the voice of inspiration unfolded the attributes of the Eternal Father to His children.
This sketch of the heathen mythology of the Shemites is, it must be owned, very barren in incident and character. It presents, indeed, no more than a shadowy hierarchy of gods and heroes, through whose thin personalities the shapes of natural objects loom with obtrusive clearness. They may serve, however, as finger-posts to point the way through the mazes of more complex, full-grown myths, and it must also be remembered that we have not touched upon the later more ornamented stories of the Egyptian gods, such as that of the death and dismemberment of Osiris by his enemy Typhon, and the recovery of his body, and his return to life through the instrumentality of Isis and Horus.
That morning speech of Belarius (in _Cymbeline_) might serve as an illustration of a primitive religion, a nature-religion in its simplest garb:
‘Stoop, boys: this gate Instructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows you To morning’s holy office: the gates of monarchs Are arched so high, that giants may jet through And keep their impious turbans on, without Good-morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven! We house i’ the rock, yet use thee not so hardly As prouder livers do.’
Omit only that part which speaks the bitterness of disappointed hopes which once centred round the doing as prouder livers do, and the rest breathes the fresh air of mountain life, different altogether from our life, free alike from its cares and temptations and moral responsibilities. Belarius gazes up with an unawful eye into the heavenly depths, and fearlessly pays his morning orisons. ‘Hail, thou fair heaven!’ There is no sense here of sin, humility, self-reproach. And in this respect--taking this for the moment as the type of an Aryan religion--how strongly it contrasts with the utterances of Hebrew writers! Is this the voice of natural as opposed to inspired religion? Not altogether; for the Semitic mind was throughout antiquity imbued with a deeper sense of awe or fear--awe in the higher religion, fear in the lower--than ever belonged to the Aryan character. We see this difference in the religions of Egypt and Assyria; and it will be remembered that, when speaking of the earliest records of the Semitic and Aryan races, we took occasion to say that it may very well have been to their admixture of Semitic blood that the Egyptians stood indebted for the mystic and allegorical part of their religious system; for among all the Semitic people, whether in ancient or modern times, we may observe a tendency--if no more--towards religious thought, and towards thoughts of that mystic character which characterized the Egyptian mythology.