first legislators were priests; the first mythologists, poets, learned
men, and physicians were priests. In their hands science became sacred
and was withheld from the profane. They spoke only in allegories, emblems,
enigmas, and ambiguous oracles--means well calculated to excite curiosity,
and above all to inspire the astonished vulgar with a holy respect for
men, who when they were thought to be instructed by the gods, and capable
of reading in the heavens the fate of the earth, boldly proclaimed
themselves the oracles of the Deity.

200.

The religions of ancient priests have only changed form. Although our
modern theologians regard their predecessors as impostors, yet they have
collected many scattered fragments of their religious systems. In modern
Religions we find, not only their metaphysical dogmas, which theology has
merely clothed in a new dress, but also some remarkable remains of their
superstitious practices, their magic, and their enchantments. Christians
are still commanded to respect the remaining monuments of the legislators,
priests, and prophets of the Hebrew Religion, which had borrowed its
strange practices from Egypt. Thus extravagancies, imagined by knaves or
idolatrous visionaries, are still sacred among Christians!

If we examine history, we shall find a striking resemblance among all
Religions. In all parts of the earth, we see, that religious notions,
periodically depress and elevate the people. The attention of man is
every where engrossed, by rites often abominable, and by mysteries always
formidable, which become the sole objects of meditation. The different
superstitions borrow, from one another, their abstract reveries and
ceremonies. Religions are in general mere unintelligible rhapsodies,
combined by new teachers, who use the materials of their predecessors,
reserving the right of adding or retrenching whatever is not conformable
to the present age. The religion of Egypt was evidently the basis of the
religion of Moses, who banished the worship of idols: Moses was merely a
schismatic Egyptian. Christianism is only reformed Judaism. Mahometanism
is composed of Judaism, Christianity, and the ancient religion of Arabia,
etc.

201.

Theology, from the remotest antiquity to the present time, has had the
exclusive privilege of directing philosophy. What assistance has been
derived from its labours? It changed philosophy into an unintelligible
jargon, calculated to render unc