y which man is united to his Creator.

Those who were so happy as to know the true God, and were chosen to be his
peculiar people, never failed to address him in all their wants and
doubts, in order to obtain his succour, and to know his will. He
accordingly vouchsafed to reveal himself to them; to conduct them by
apparitions, dreams, oracles, and prophecies; and to protect them by
miracles of the most astonishing kind.

But those who were so blind as to substitute falsehood in the place of
truth, directed themselves, for the like aid, to fictitious and deceitful
deities, who were not able to answer their expectations, nor recompense
the homage that mortals paid them, any otherwise than by error and
illusion, and a fraudulent imitation of the conduct of the true God.

Hence arose the vain observation of dreams, which, from a superstitious
credulity, they mistook for salutary warnings from Heaven; those obscure
and equivocal answers of oracles, beneath whose veil the spirits of
darkness concealed their ignorance; and, by a studied ambiguity, reserved
to themselves an evasion or subterfuge, whatever might be the event. To
this are owing the prognostics with regard to futurity, which men fancied
they should find in the entrails of beasts, in the flight and singing of
birds, in the aspect of the planets, in fortuitous accidents, and in the
caprice of chance; those dreadful prodigies that filled a whole nation
with terror, and which, it was believed, nothing could expiate but
mournful ceremonies, and even sometimes the effusion of human blood: in
fine, those black inventions of magic, those delusions, enchantments,
sorceries, invocations of ghosts, and many other kinds of divination.

All I have here related was a received usage, observed by the heathen
nations in general; and this usage was founded on the principles of that
religion of which I have given a short account. We have a signal proof of
this in that passage of the Cyropaedia,(48) where Cambyses, the father of
Cyrus, gives that young prince such noble instructions; instructions
admirably well adapted to form the great captain, and great king. He
exhorts him, above all things, to pay the highest reverence to the gods;
and not to undertake any enterprise, whether important or inconsiderable,
without first calling upon and consulting them; he enjoins him to honour
the priests and augurs, as being their ministers and the interpreters of
their will, but yet not to tru