tute of resources, had not the leisure to
combine principles and draw conclusions; affected with more evils than
they found pleasures, their most habitual sentiment was that of fear,
their theology terror; their worship was confined to a few salutations
and offerings to beings whom they conceived as greedy and ferocious as
themselves. In their state of equality and independence, no man offered
himself as mediator between men and gods as insubordinate and poor as
himself. No one having superfluities to give, there existed no parasite
by the name of priest, no tribute by the name of victim, no empire by
the name of altar. Their dogmas and their morals were the same thing, it
was only self-preservation; and religion, that arbitrary idea, without
influence on the mutual relations of men, was a vain homage rendered to
the visible powers of nature.

"Such was the necessary and original idea of God."

And the orator, addressing himself to the savage nations, continued:

"We appeal to you, men who have received no foreign and factitious
ideas; tell us, have you ever gone beyond what I have described? And
you, learned doctors, we call you to witness; is not this the unanimous
testimony of all ancient monuments?*

* It clearly results, says Plutarch, from the verses of
Orpheus and the sacred books of the Egyptians and Phrygians,
that the ancient theology, not only of the Greeks, but of
all nations, was nothing more than a system of physics, a
picture of the operations of nature, wrapped up in
mysterious allegories and enigmatical symbols, in a manner
that the ignorant multitude attended rather to their
apparent than to their hidden meaning, and even in what they
understood of the latter, supposed there to be something
more deep than what they perceived. Fragment of a work of
Plutarch now lost, quoted by Eusebius, Proepar. Evang. lib.
3, ch. 1, p. 83.

The majority of philosophers, says Porphyry, and among
others Haeremon (who lived in Egypt in the first age of
Christianity), imagine there never to have been any other
world than the one we see, and acknowledged no other Gods of
all those recognized by the Egyptians, than such as are
commonly called planets, signs of the Zodiac, and
constellations; whose aspects, that is, rising and setting,
are supposed to influence the fortunes of men; to which they
add their divisions