Omina: Sometimes in Monsters, or unusuall accidents; as Ecclipses,
Comets, rare Meteors, Earthquakes, Inundations, uncouth Births, and the
like, which they called Portenta and Ostenta, because they thought them
to portend, or foreshew some great Calamity to come; Sometimes, in meer
Lottery, as Crosse and Pile; counting holes in a sive; dipping of Verses
in Homer, and Virgil; and innumerable other such vaine conceipts. So
easie are men to be drawn to believe any thing, from such men as have
gotten credit with them; and can with gentlenesse, and dexterity, take
hold of their fear, and ignorance.

The Designes Of The Authors Of The Religion Of The Heathen And therefore
the first Founders, and Legislators of Common-wealths amongst the
Gentiles, whose ends were only to keep the people in obedience, and
peace, have in all places taken care; First, to imprint in their minds a
beliefe, that those precepts which they gave concerning Religion, might
not be thought to proceed from their own device, but from the dictates
of some God, or other Spirit; or else that they themselves were of a
higher nature than mere mortalls, that their Lawes might the more easily
be received: So Numa Pompilius pretended to receive the Ceremonies he
instituted amongst the Romans, from the Nymph Egeria: and the first King
and founder of the Kingdome of Peru, pretended himselfe and his wife to
be the children of the Sunne: and Mahomet, to set up his new Religion,
pretended to have conferences with the Holy Ghost, in forme of a Dove.
Secondly, they have had a care, to make it believed, that the same
things were displeasing to the Gods, which were forbidden by the
Lawes. Thirdly, to prescribe Ceremonies, Supplications, Sacrifices, and
Festivalls, by which they were to believe, the anger of the Gods might
be appeased; and that ill success in War, great contagions of Sicknesse,
Earthquakes, and each mans private Misery, came from the Anger of
the Gods; and their Anger from the Neglect of their Worship, or the
forgetting, or mistaking some point of the Ceremonies required. And
though amongst the antient Romans, men were not forbidden to deny, that
which in the Poets is written of the paines, and pleasures after this
life; which divers of great authority, and gravity in that state have
in their Harangues openly derided; yet that beliefe was alwaies more
cherished, than the contrary.

And by these, and such other Institutions, they obtayned in order to
their