* drawn from the poets or from the ecclesiastical fathers; both of whom are very much addicted to fictions. The enemies of a religion are never well acquainted with it because they detest it, and often detest it because they are not acquainted with it. They eagerly take up the most atrocious calumnies against it; impute to their adversaries dogmas that they abhor, and consequences of which they have never dreamt. The followers of a religion, on the other hand, full of that faith which esteems it a crime to doubt, sacrifice in its defence their reason and even their virtue. Forging prophecies, counterfeiting miracles, palliating what they cannot defend, and boldly denying what they cannot allegorise, are means which no devotee was ever ashamed to employ. Let us recollect the Christians and the Jews. Ask their enemies respecting them, and you will be told they were magicians and idolators; they, whose religion was as pure as their morals were strict. Never has a Mussulman hesitated on the doctrine of the unity of God.§ Yet how often have our good ancestors accused them of worshipping the stars! In the very bosom of these religions have arisen a hundred different sects, who, accusing each other of having corrupted their common doctrines, have inspired the multitude with fury and the wise with moderation. Yet these were civilised nations, and books recognised as emanating from the Deity settled the principles of their belief; but how shall we discover these principles amid a confused mass of fables dictated by an isolated, contradictory, and mutilated tradition to a few savage tribes in Greece? LVII. Reason here affords us but little aid. It is absurd to dedicate temples to those whose sepulchres were before the eyes. But what is there too absurd for mankind? Are we not acquainted with some very enlightened nations who appeal to the testimony of the senses for the proofs of a religion, whose principal dogma contradicts that testimony? Yet if the gods of paganism had been men, the reciprocal worship paid them by the various sects of worshippers would not have been very rational, and an irrational toleration is not an error common among the vulgar. LVIII. Croesus sent to consult the oracle at Delphi ;** Alexander traversed the burning sands of Libya, to ask Jupiter Ammon if he were not his son. ++ But would not this Grecian Jupiter, this king of Crete, when once he had become the Lord of Thunder, have crushed that Libyan Ammon, that new Salmoneus, who endeavoured to wrest it from him? When two rivals dispute the dominion of the * We must, however, make a distinction in favour of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and the tragic poets, who lived while tradition was in a purer state. + On this particular see Dr. Middleton's Free Enquiry, and the History of Manichæism by M. de Beausobre: two fine monuments of an enlightened age. Taciti Historia, lib. v.; Fleury, Ecclesiastical History, tom. i. p. 369, and tom. ii. p. 5; and the Apologies of Justin Martyr and Tertullian, which are there quoted. § Herbelot, Bibliotheca Orientalis, article Allah, p. 100; and Sale's Koran, Preliminary Discourse, p. 71. Relandus de Religione Mahometanâ, part ii. cap. 6 & 7. ¶ See Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, tom i. p. 270-276. ** Herodotus, lib. i. ++ Diodorus Siculus, lib. xvii; Quintus Curtius, lib. iv. cap. 7; Arrian, lib. iii. universe, how can both be at once recognised as supreme? But if both the one and the other were nothing more than the ether, the heavens, the same deity, the Greek and the African might have designated them by those symbols which were most accordant with their manners, and by the names with which their languages furnished them to express their attributes. But away with reasonings; facts are what we must interrogate, and let us listen to their answer. LIX. The Greeks were unfortunately situated among forests, nd though so proud, yet had received all their accomplishments from foreigners. The Phoenicians taught them the use of letters; for their arts, their laws, and all that raises man above the brute, they were indebted to the Egyptians, from whom also they acquired their religion, and in its adoption paid the tribute due from ignorance to learning. Prejudice made no more than a decorous resistance, and surrendered without difficulty after hearing the oracle of Dodona give its decision for the new faith.* Such is the relation given by Herodotus, who was well acquainted both with Greece and Egypt, and whose time, being situated between the stupidity of ignorance and the refinements of philosophy renders him a very competent witness. LX. Already a great part of the Grecian legends have disappeared; the birth of Apollo in Delos, the burial of Jupiter in Crete. If these gods really did dwell, at a former period, on the earth, Egypt, and not Greece, was their native country. But if the priests of Memphis understood their religion as well as the Abbé Banier,† Egypt had never given birth to their deities. Across the obscurity of their metaphysics shone a few rays of reason, sufficient to make them apprehend that a man could never become God, nor God ever be transformed into a mere man. Mysterious both in their doctrines and in their worship, these interpreters of celestial wisdom disguised beneath a pompous diction the truths of nature, which in their own majestic simplicity would have been despised by a stupid people. The Greeks mistook this religion in many respects, they altered it by strange admixtures, but the basis still remained, and this Egyptian foundation was consequently allegoric.§ LXI. The worship of heroes, so well distinguished from that of the gods in the earlier ages of Greece, clearly demonstrates to us that the gods were not heroes. The ancients believed that great *Herodotus, lib. ii. In his Mythology explained by History. § In these researches I am under great obligations to the learned Freret of the Academie des Belles Lettres. He has opened up a road which previously appeared shut in on every side. Yet I think his reasonings of more value when relating to facts than when enquiring about doctrines. Prepossessed with a feeling of esteem for this scholar, I eagerly devoured his answer to the Newtonian Chronology; but dare I speak it? It did not answer my expectations. What novelty is there in it if you take from it the principles of a new theology and chronology, which were already in our possession (in the Mém. de l'Acad. des Belles Lettres, tom. v. xviii. xx. xxiii.), a few defective and inconclusive genealogies, some minute researches on the chronology of Sparta, an ancient system of astronomy which I cannot very well understand, and the elegant preface by M. de Bougainville, which I always reperuse with renewed delight? Histoire de l'Académie des Belles Lettres, tom. xvi. p. 28, &c. men were admitted after death to the feasts of the gods, and enjoyed their felicity but not their power. They assembled around their benefactors' tombs; their songs of praise * celebrated their memories, and gave rise to a salutary emulation of their virtues. Their shades evoked from the infernal regions experienced pleasure in tasting the offerings of devotion. It is true that that devotion became imperceptibly transformed into a religious worship, but this was not until a much later period, when these heroes were identified with those ancient divinities whose name they bore or whose character they imitated. In Homer's time they were still preserved distinct. He does not account Hercules one of the gods; he believes Esculapius to have been merely an eminent physician; and Castor and Pollux are, according to him, deceased warriors buried at Sparta §. LXII. Superstition had, however, overstepped these boundaries, the heroes had been transformed into gods, and the worship paid to the gods had drawn them from among the ranks of men; when a bold philosopher undertook to prove that they had been such. Ephemerus the Messenian advanced this paradox. || But far from appealing to the authentic monuments of Greece and Egypt, which ought to have preserved the memories of these famous men, he loses himself in the immensity of the ocean. An Utopia despised by all the ancients, an island of Panchaia, rich, fertile, superstitious, and known only to himself, offers him, in a splendid temple of Jupiter, a golden column on which Mercury had engraved the exploits and the apotheoses of the heroes of his race. These fables were too gross even for the Greeks themselves. They only obtained for their author universal contempt and the appellation of an atheist.** * See Mémoires de Littérature, tom. xii. p. 5, &c., and Ezekiel Spanheim in Callimachum. † Homer's Odyssey, lib. xi. Homer's Iliad, lib. iv. ver. 194. § Odyssey, lib. v. ver. 241. Lactantius, Institutiones, lib. i. cap. 11, p. 62. " Antiquus auctor Ephemerus, qui fuit è civitate Messanâ, res gestas Jovis et cæterorum qui Dii putantur, collegit; historiamque contexit ex titulis et inscriptionibus sacris, quæ in antiquissimis templis habebantur, maximèque in fano Jovis Triphylii, ubi auream columnam positam esse ab ipso Jove, titulus indicabat, in quâ columnâ gesta sua perscripsit ut monumentum esset posteris rerum suarum.' This relation of Lactantius differs a little from that of Diodorus. ¶ Diodorus Siculus, lib. v. cap. 29, 30, and lib. vi. M. Fourmont, sen. has a dissertation on Ephemerus, which contains some very bold conjectures, and some very laughable transpositions. It ill becomes a young man to despise anything, but I cannot refute this treatise in a serious manner. He who does not see that the Panchaia described in Diodorus Siculus was situated to the south of Gedrosia, and a little to the west of the peninsula of India, may with M. Fourmont believe that the Arabian Gulf is in the middle of Arabia Felix, that the country of Phank on the continent is the island of Panchaia, that the desert of Paran is the pleasantest place in the world, and that the city of Pieria in Syria is the capital of a small province in the vicinity of Medina. **Callimachus apud Plutarchum, tom. ii. p. 880; Eratosthenes et Polybius apud Strabonis Geographiam, lib. ii. p. 102, 103; et lib. vii. p 299, editio Casauboni. Gerard Vossius (de Historiis Græcis, lib. i. cap. 11) makes it appear that not only did the pagans give him this name, but also Theophilus of Antioch among the Christians and Josephus among the Jews; which renders it probable that while Ephemerus attacked the gods of Greece, he did not adopt any others in their place. LXIII. Emboldened, perhaps, by his example, the Cretans boasted that they were in possession of Jupiter's tomb, who, after a long reign in their island, had died there. Callimachus testifies great indignation at this fiction, and his scholiast informs us of its origin. On a tomb was written" The tomb of Minos the son of Jupiter." Time or design had effaced the words "Minos the son of," and it read, "The tomb of Jupiter." Yet Ephemerus's system, in spite of its proofs, gained credit but slowly. Diodorus Siculus traversed the earth to seek support for it in the traditions of different nations. § But the Stoics, in their strange mixture of the purest theism with Spinosism and the popular idolatry, referred paganism, of which they were zealous followers, to the worship of nature divided into as many gods as there are different aspects of it. Cicero, that academic philosopher, with whom all was objection and nothing proof, scarcely dared to oppose to them Ephemerus's system. LXIV. It was not until the time of the Empire that the Messenian's ideas obtained an ascendancy. At a period when a slavish world was decreeing the title of gods to monsters unworthy of the name of men, it was a flattering method of paying homage, to confound Jupiter with Domitian. Benefactors of the world, for such were they styled by adulation, they had the same right to deification when their natures and powers had been supposed equal. Either by policy or by mistake, Pliny himself fell into this error. In vain did Plutarch endeavour to vindicate the religion of his ancestors.** Ephemerus prevailed on every hand; and the ecclesiastical fathers, profiting by their advantages, attacked paganism on its weakest side. Can they be blamed for this? If the pretended gods were not actually deified men, yet they had at least become so in the opinions of their worshippers; and the fathers had no concern except with their opinions. LXV. Let us proceed a little farther and endeavour to follow the connexion, not of facts, but of ideas; to penetrate into the human heart, and disentangle that knot of errors, which from the correct, simple, and universal feeling, that there is a power superior to mankind, gradually conducted to the creation of gods, such as it would have been shameful to resemble. Feeling is only a turning back upon ourselves; ideas have relations to external objects. The greatness of their number, by occu pying the mind, diminishes the strength of feeling. Therefore, among savages, whose ideas are confined to their wants, and whose * Lactantius, Institutiones, lib. i. cap. 11, p. 65; Lucian, Timon. p. 34, et Jupiter Fragmente, p. 701; Cicero de Naturâ Deorum, lib. iii. cap. 21. + Callimachus, Hymnon in Jovem, v. 8; et Scholiastes Vetus in loco, edit. Græca. Such is the scholiast's account, which is adopted by Sir Isaac Newton. But Lactantius reports the inscription to be ZAN XPONOT, which to me has a much more antique appearance. Lucian, for fables are always growing, tells us that the inscription imported that Jupiter thundered no longer, but had undergone the fate of mortals; δηλουσαν ὡς οὐκέτι βροντησειεν ἂν ὁ Ζευς, τεθνεώς παλαι. § Diodorus Siculus in his first five books, passim. | Cicero de Naturâ Deorum, lib. iii. cap. 21. I wants are merely those implanted by nature, the most vivid feelings It. are probably to be found; though, at the same time, they are the most confused. Agitations of mind are continually being experienced by the savage, which he can neither explain nor repress. Feeble and ignorant, he fears everything because he can defend himself from nothing, and wonders at everything because he knows nothing. His well-founded contempt of himself (for vanity is a product of society) makes him feel the certainty of the existence of a superior Power, to which he prays, though ignorant of its attributes, and whose favours he requests, without knowing what right he has to hope for them. This indistinct feeling produced the good gods of the early Greeks, and the deities of the greater part of savages; neither of whom knew how to regulate their number, character, or worship. LXVI. Feelings quickly became ideas. The savage paid homage to all surrounding objects, and all must have appeared to him more excellent than himself. That majestic oak, which overshadowed him with its thick foliage, had sheltered his ancestors ever since the first commencement of his race; it raised its head up among the clouds; the fierce Boreas was lost among its boughs. Compared with this gigantic tree, what was his duration, his stature, his strength? Gratitude was united to admiration; that tree which amply furnished him with acorns, that clear fountain where he slaked his thirst, were benefactors who rendered his life happy; without them he was unable to exist, but what need had they of him? Indeed, without that light of knowledge which teaches us how far superior is reason alone to all these necessary parts of a well ordered system, each of them is really a more exalted being than a man. But destitute of this knowledge, the savage conferred on each of them life and power, and prostrated himself before the beings which he had himself created. LXVII. His ideas were singular because they were simple. To remark the different qualities of objects, to notice those which are common to more than one, and from this resemblance to form an abstract idea, which shall represent a genus though it be not the image of any one particular object, are the operations of a mind which is continually active, reflecting upon itself, and being already overcharged with ideas, endeavours to relieve itself by methodical arrangement. In this state of primitive simplicity, the passive soul, ignorant of its own strength, can do no more than receive external impressions, which inform him of objects merely in an isolated state, and as they are in themselves. The savage met his gods everywhere, and every forest and meadow swarmed with their multitudes. LXVIII. Experience was the means of developing his faculties; for nations, like individuals, are indebted for everything to experience. His mind being familiarised with a considerable number of exterior objects, apprehended the common qualities of their natures; which thus formed a new divinity superior to all the other separate gods. But every being is confined to a particular time or place, and |