their dead beyond the
limits of the inhabited country, in the desert of the West. To go there,
it was necessary to pass the channels of the river, and consequently
to be received into a boat, and pay something to the ferryman, without
which the body, deprived of sepulture, must have been the prey of wild
beasts. This custom suggested to the civil and religious legislators the
means of a powerful influence on manners; and, addressing uncultivated
and ferocious men with the motives of filial piety and a reverence for
the dead, they established, as a necessary condition, their undergoing
a previous trial, which should decide whether the deceased merited to
be admitted to the rank of the family in the black city. Such an idea
accorded too well with all the others, not to be incorporated with them:
the people soon adopted it; and hell had its Minos and its Rhadamanthus,
with the wand, the bench, the ushers, and the urn, as in the earthly and
civil state. It was then that God became a moral and political being,
a lawgiver to men, and so much the more to be dreaded, as this supreme
legislator, this final judge, was inaccessible and invisible. Then it
was that this fabulous and mythological world, composed of such odd
materials and disjointed parts, became a place of punishments and of
rewards, where divine justice was supposed to correct what was vicious
and erroneous in the judgment of men. This spiritual and mystical
system acquired the more credit, as it took possession of man by all his
natural inclinations. The oppressed found in it the hope of indemnity,
and the consolation of future vengeance; the oppressor, expecting by
rich offerings to purchase his impunity, formed out of the errors of the
vulgar an additional weapon of oppression; the chiefs of nations, the
kings and priests, found in this a new instrument of domination by the
privilege which they reserved to themselves of distributing the favors
and punishments of the great judge, according to the merit or demerit
of actions, which they took care to characterize as best suited their
system.

"This, then, is the manner in which an invisible and imaginary world
has been introduced into the real and visible one; this is the origin of
those regions of pleasure and pain, of which you Persians have made your
regenerated earth, your city of resurrection, placed under the equator,
with this singular attribute, that in it the blessed cast no shade.* Of
these materials, Jews