questions, if maturely confidered and honestly answered, will shew many mens belief concerning the Deity, and their religion, in a light very different from that in which they before appeared.

THо' moft men acknowledge that no opinions are of near fo much confequence as thofe relating to God and religion, yet there are none they more commonly take upon truft: abundance of people learn creeds and catechifms by rote, as they do ballads, and reafon as little upon the former as the latter.

MANY articles of religious belief are warmly embraced, and ftrenuously defended, not because they are reafonable, but because they were early imbibed and received with reverence, or becaufe they fuit mens tempers or interefts. We are very apt to imagine, that opinions inculcated in our youth, which have as it were grown up with us, and we have long entertained, are the refult of our own reafoning, tho' we never reafoned about them. Such of thefe as are apparently agreeable to truth, it matters not much whether they were discovered by ourselves, or learned from others: but those which appear doubtful, and confequently require examination, ought not to be admitted by us 'till we have examined them, and thoroughly too: for by this means, and this only, if we then find

them

them true, or at least probable, they become properly our own sentiments.

HAVING premised these few general obfervations, we shall confider our fubject under the three following heads, viz.

FIRST, The opinions which commonly have been, or now are entertained, by the greatest part of mankind, concerning the cruelty of the Deity or Deities worshipped by them.

I

SECONDLY, The barbarous methods of devotion frequently practised.

THIRDLY, Men's inhuman treatment of one another, on account of their different fentiments in religion, and different forms of worship.

AR

SECTION I.

S we have no clear or fatisfactory account of the creation of man', we do not know his original opinion concerning his Creator, nor what was the first object of his worship.

G 4

The relations of all heathen authors concerning the -origin of man are undoubtedly fabulous inventions; and the account of it in the book of Genefis, faid to be written by Mofes, has been by many learned men efteemed an allegory, and certainly hath much more the appearance of that than a hiftory: however, it is at beft very fhort, dark, and unfatisfactory,

worship. If the existence of ONE, eternal, invisible, almighty being, of infinite goodnefs, creator of the universe, was known to our general parent', it is highly probable that almost his whole pofterity foon lost, in a great degree at least, this knowledge, and indeed all rational fentiments of the Deity: for, according to the most ancient accounts we have in history, men began in the very early ages of the world to worship a multitude of strange gods indeed: and furely nothing could be more unreasonable and ridiculous than their conceptions relating to them; fo unreasonable and ridiculous, that had we not undoubted proofs of it, we should hardly believe that the reafon and underftanding of man, if at first in any degree of perfection, could ever become fo depraved, or fink fo low. And as mens notions on this fubject were thus abfurd, they were likewife in many respects very various:, and this is not to be wondered at; for tho' truth is always

Agreeably to what we are taught, and to the opinion commonly received, all the generations of men are here fupposed to have originally proceeded from one man and woman: but this, nevertheless, feems in the highest degree improbable for many reafons, and particularly becaufe white men and black could not proceed from the fame parents. However, whether one pair or more were at first created, makes little or no difference in the cafe here stated.

ways one and the fame, error is changeable and unbounded.

BUT whatever different opinions men in other refpects, when they departed from the truth, entertained concerning their gods, they pretty generally agreed in afcribing to them the fame tempers, difpofitions, and paffions they experienced in themfelves, and many times their bodily likeneffes alfo ". For what has been more common in most nations, and with people of moft religions, than to represent their deities in a human shape?

EVEN among chriftians there was formerly a fect, particularly the monks of Egypt, who profeffed themselves anthropomorphites, (or fuch who attributed to God the figure of a man) and thereupon held that man was created after the image of God. And fo violent were these monks for this opinion, that they were about to have killed Theophilus their bishop, as an impious perfon, for preaching

and

The Lacedæmonians, who were one of the moft warlike people that ever appeared in the world, conftantly represented all their gods, and even their goddeffes also, in armour. Mr. Peter Kolben, in his Prefent State of the Cape of Good-Hope, informs us, that fome of the Hottentots, who are the filthieft of all human creatures, conftantly befmearing their bodies and apparel (a fkin of fome beaft over their fhoulders) with greafe and foot mixed, infift upon it, that the supreme God is in colour, fhape, and apparel, like the fineft amongst themselves, Vol. I. p. 94.

and writing against it: but he artfully mollified their fury by faying to them, "When “I see you, I think I behold the face of "God"." Both Tertullian and Epiphanius, those grand champions against herefies, and who lived in the early days of christianity, have been charged with this grofs error. And indeed, what is more common at this day among many of those called chriftians, than to see the almighty, allwise, incomprehenfible, invifible Creator of the universe, reprefented under the form of a weak foolish man * ?

IT is evident, that when moft men form ideas of their gods, and of the One God alfo, they take themselves for the originals; they draw their own features enlarged and heightened: in their conceptions gods are but gigantic or coloffean men, and men are diminutive or pigmy gods. And perhaps, if other animals and reptiles, and even infects, were capable of forming ideas of gods, they would alfo imagine they were like themselves; they would

Sozomen, tranflated into French by M. Coufin, ch. xi.

-P. 472.

* Pictures of God the Father in the likeness of an old man are very common, efpecially in Roman Catholic countries: the author of thefe Effays has feen, at Lyons in France, fuch a picture, with a hat cocked up, according to the prefent fashion, on three fides, probably to reprefent the Trinity.