nd gave them consistency.

"The inhabitants of Egypt having remarked that the putrefaction of dead
bodies became in their burning climate the source of pestilence and
diseases, the custom was introduced in a great number of States, of
burying the dead at a distance from the inhabited districts, in the
desert which lies at the West. To arrive there it was necessary to cross
the canals of the river in a boat, and to pay a toll to the ferryman,
otherwise the body remaining unburied, would have been left a prey
to wild beasts. This custom suggested to her civil and religious
legislators, a powerful means of affecting the manners of her
inhabitants, and addressing savage and uncultivated men with the motives
of filial piety and reverence for the dead; they introduced, as a
necessary condition, the undergoing that previous trial which should
decide whether the deceased deserved to be admitted upon the footing of
his family honors into the _black city_. Such an idea too well accorded
with the rest of the business not to be incorporated with it; it
accordingly entered for an article into religious creeds, and hel had
its Minos and its Radamanthus, with the wand, the chair, the guards, and
the urn, after the exact model of this civil transaction. The divinity
then, for the first time, became a subject of moral and political
consideration, a legislator, by so much the more formidable as,
while his judgment was final and his decrees without appeal, he was
unapproachable to his subjects. This mythological and fabulous creation,
composed as it was of scattered and discordant parts, then became a
source of future punishments and rewards, in which divine justice was
supposed to correct the vices and errors of this transitory state. A
spiritual and mystical system, such as have mentioned, acquired so
much the more credit as it applied itself to the mind by every argument
suited to it. The oppressed looked thither for an indemnification, and
entertained the consoling hope of vengeance; the oppressor expected by
the costliness of his offerings to secure to himself impunity, and
at the same time employed this principle to inspire the vulgar with
timidity; kings and priests, the heads of the people, saw in it a
new source of power, as they reserved to themselves the privilege of
awarding the favors or the censure of the great Judge of all, accord-ing
to the opinion they, should inculcate of the odiousness of crimes and
the meritoriousness