But as time passed, this earlier nonethical religion, as is evidenced by the texts recovered from the long-buried temple libraries,[102] became in a measure moralized. A moral character was given to the great gods, and they became the inspirers and guardians of a true morality. This ethicalizing process was the same in character as that which went on in the religion of the ancient Hebrews, gradually moralizing the primitive conceptions and cult of Yahweh until among that people religion and morality became wholly at one. The ethical development, however, never went as far as this in Babylonia and Assyria, but the movement was such as to lift these peoples far above the low moral plane of primitive society. “In the seventh century before Christ, if not earlier, the Babylonians and Assyrians possessed a system of morality which in many respects resembled that of the descendants of Abraham.”[103] [Sidenote: Evidence afforded by the penitential psalms of the growth in moral feeling] The ethical movement found its truest expression in the so-called penitential hymns,[104] which are in spirit altogether like the penitential psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures.[105] They exhibit the same intense yearning of the penitent soul for reconciliation and union with a god conceived as just and holy and piteous. In one hymn is found the new moral conception that disease is the work of a good spirit. This is a very lofty ethical idea, and approaches the Hebrew conception of afflictions as the visitation in disguise of love. But this idea seems never to have become a permanent part of the Babylonian moral consciousness. In these psalms and prayers we have evidence that at times the worshipers of Marduk and Ashur attained to almost as lofty a conception of deity as that reached by the teachers and prophets of Israel. The great gods were conceived as the creators, the sustainers of man; as loving, compassionate, merciful, and forgiving. The religious-moral ideal was here verging toward the highest that man has ever been able to form, and could this standard have been steadily upheld and the lower abandoned, then Babylonia and Assyria like Judea might have made precious contributions to the moral life of humanity. But this was not done. The tablets holding magical formulas and incantations, wholly devoid of all ethical character, outnumber a thousand to one those exhaling the spiritual perfume of genuine moral feeling and aspiration. [Sidenote: Ethical significance of the conception of the after life]