he sake of its political uses.*

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* "How absurd soever the articles of faith may be which superstition has
adopted, or how unhallowed the rites which it prescribes, the former are
received, in every age and country with unhesitating assent, by the
great body of the people, and the latter observed with scrupulous
exactness. In our reasonings concerning opinions and practices which
differ widely from our own, we are extremely apt to err. Having been
instructed ourselves in the principles of a religion worthy in every
respect of that Divine wisdom by which they were dictated, we frequently
express wonder at the credulity of nations, in embracing systems of
belief which appear to us so directly repugnant to right reason; and
sometimes suspect that tenets so wild and extravagant do not really gain
credit with them. But experience may satisfy us, that neither our wonder
nor suspicions are well founded. No article of the public religion was
called in question by those people of ancient Europe with whose history
we are best acquainted; and no practice which it enjoined appeared
improper to them. On the other hand, every opinion that tended to
diminish the reverence of men for the gods of their country, or to
alienate them from their worship, excited, among the Greeks and Romans,
that indignant zeal which is natural to every people attached to their
religion by a firm persuasion of its truth." Ind. Dis. p. 321. That the
learned Brahmins of the East are rational Theists, and secretly reject
the established theory, and contemn the rites that were founded upon
them, or rather consider them as contrivances to be supported for their
political uses, see Dr. Robertson's Ind. Dis. p. 324-334.
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Or if it should be allowed, that the ancient heathens believed in their
religion less generally than the present Indians do, I am far from
thinking that this circumstance would afford any facility to the work
of the apostles, above that of the modern missionaries. To me it
appears, and I think it material to be remarked, that a disbelief of the
established religion of their country has no tendency to dispose men for
the reception of another; but that, on the contrary, it generates a
settled contempt of all religious pretensions whatever. General
infidelity is the hardest soil which the propagators of a new religion
can have to work upon. Could a Methodist or Moravian promise himself a
better chance of success with a French