ore Moses), since he quitted his system of idols
for that of the god Yahouh; so that we may place its
promulgation about the seventeenth or eighteenth century
before Christ; which corresponds with what we have said
before.

As to the history of Moses, Diodorus properly represents it
when he says, lib. 34 and 40, "That the Jews were driven out
of Egypt at a time of dearth, when the country was full of
foreigners, and that Moses, a man of extraordinary prudence
seized this opportunity of establishing his religion in the
mountains of Judea." It will seem paradoxical to assert,
that the 600,000 armed men whom he conducted thither ought
to be reduced to 6,000; but I can confirm the assertion by
so many proofs drawn from the books themselves, that it will
be necessary to correct an error which appears to have
arisen from the mistake of the transcribers.

*** This was the monosyllable written on the gates of the
temple of Delphos. Plutarch has made it the subject of a
dissertation.

**** These are the literal expressions of the book of
Deuteronomy, chap. XXXII. "The works of Tsour are perfect."
Now Tsour has been translated by the word creator; its
proper signification is to give forms, and this is one of
the definitions of Osiris in Plutarch.

X. Religion of Zoroaster.

"Such also was Zoroaster; who, five centuries after Moses, and in the
time of David, revived and moralized among the Medes and Bactrians, the
whole Egyptian system of Osiris and Typhon, under the names Ormuzd and
Ahrimanes; who called the reign of summer, virtue and good; the reign of
winter, sin and evil; the renewal of nature in spring, creation of the
world; the conjunction of the spheres at secular periods, resurrection;
and the Tartarus and Elysium of the astrologers and geographers were
named future life, hell and paradise. In a word, he did nothing but
consecrate the existing dreams of the mystical system.

XI. Budsoism, or Religion of the Samaneans.

"Such again are the propagators of the dismal doctrine of the Samaneans;
who, on the basis of the Metempsychosis, have erected the misanthropic
system of self-denial, and of privations; who, laying it down as a
principle that the body is only a prison where the soul lives in an
impure confinement, that life is only a dream, an illusion, and the
world only a passage to anot