13. Yet there are also prayers for protection and help addressed to beings conceived as essentially good and beneficent--a step marking a great advance in the moral feeling and religious consciousness of the people. Such beings--gods, in fact--were, above all, Ana and Ea, whom we saw invoked in the incantation of the Seven Maskim as "Spirit of Heaven," and "Spirit of Earth." The latter especially is appealed to as an unfailing refuge to ill-used and terrified mortals. He is imagined as possessed of all knowledge and wisdom, which he uses only to befriend and protect. His usual residence is the deep,--(hence his name, _E-a_, "the House of Waters")--but he sometimes travels round the earth in a magnificent ship. His very name is a terror to the evil ones. He knows the words, the spells that will break their power and compel their obedience. To him, therefore, the people looked in their need with infinite trust. Unable to cope with the mysterious dangers and snares which, as they fancied, beset them on all sides, ignorant of the means of defeating the wicked beings who, they thought, pursued them with abominable malice and gratuitous hatred, they turned to Ea. _He_ would know. _He_ must be asked, and he would tell. 14. But, as though bethinking themselves that Ea was a being too mighty and exalted to be lightly addressed and often disturbed, the Shumiro-Accads imagined a beneficent spirit, MERIDUG (more correctly MIRRI-DUGGA), called son of Ea and DAMKINA, (a name of Earth). Meridug's only office is to act as mediator between his father and suffering mankind. It is he who bears to Ea the suppliant's request, exposes his need sometimes in very moving words, and requests to know the remedy--if illness be the trouble--or the counter-spell, if the victim be held in the toils of witchcraft. Ea tells his son, who is then supposed to reveal the secret to the chosen instrument of assistance--of course the conjuring priest, or better, soothsayer. As most incantations are conceived on this principle, they are very monotonous in form, though frequently enlivened by the supposed dialogue between the father and son. Here is one of the more entertaining specimens. It occupies an entire tablet, but unfortunately many lines have been hopelessly injured, and have to be omitted. The text begins: "The Disease of the Head has issued from the Abyss, from the dwelling of the Lord of the Abyss." Then follow the symptoms and the description of the sufferer's inability to help himself. Then "Meridug has looked on his misery. He has entered the dwelling of his father Ea, and has spoken unto him: "'My father, the Disease of the Head has issued from the Abyss.' "A second time he has spoken unto him: "'What he must do against it the man knows not. How shall he find healing?' "Ea has replied to his son Meridug: