The religion of Assyria and Babylonia was, in its essential principles and in the general spirit of its conceptions, of the same character of the religion of Egypt, and in general as all pagan religions. When we penetrate beneath the surface which gross Polytheism has acquired from popular superstition, and revert to its original and higher conceptions, we shall find the whole based on the idea of the unity of the Deity, the last relic of the primitive revelation, disfigured indeed and all but lost in the monstrous ideas of Pantheism; confounding the creature with the Creator; and transforming the Deity into a god-world, whose manifestations are to be found in all the phenomena of nature. Beneath this supreme and sole God, this great All, in whom all things are lost and absorbed, are ranked in an order of emanation corresponding to their importance, a whole race of secondary deities who are emanations from His very substance, who are mere personifications of His attributes and manifestations. The differences between the various pagan religions is chiefly marked by the differences between these secondary divine beings. Thus, as we have already seen, the imagination of the Egyptians had been especially struck by the various stages of the daily and yearly course of the sun. In this they saw the most imposing manifestations of the Deity, that which best revealed the laws of the government of the world. In this they sought their divine personification. The Chaldæo-Assyrians, especially devoted to astronomy, saw in the Astral, and especially in the planetary system, a manifestation of the divine being. They considered the stars as His true external manifestation, and in their religious system made them the visible evidence of the subordinate divine emanations from the substance of the infinite being, whom they identified with the world, his work. THE SUPREME GOD, ILU.