We are such fools, that we have made God glorious like ourselves. That worthy chief of the dervises, Ben-bade his being praised in the schools of al-betif, said to his brethren one day :

European; "he also treats of that celebrated people, the Greeks."-"Who are these Greeks?" asked the man of letters. "Ah!" continued the other, "they inha

part as large as China, but which has been famous throughout the world.""I have never heard speak of these people neither in Mogul, nor in Japan, nor in Great Tartary," said the Chinese, with

ligion of the men of letters, of that simple worship which we render to the Supreme Being. How pleasing to see what is said in Europe of our arts, many of which are more ancient amongst us than any Euro-bited a province about a two-hundredth pean kingdom. I guess the author will have made many mistakes in the history of the war which we had twenty-two thousand five hundred and fifty-two years ago, with the warlike nations of Tonquin and Japan; and of that solemn embassyan ingenuous look. which the mighty Emperor of the Moguls sent to ask laws from us, in the year of the world 500,000,000,000,079,123, 450,000." "Alas!" said one of the learned men to him, "you are not even mentioned in that book; you are too inconsiderable; it is almost all about the first nation in the world-the only nation, the great Jewish people!"

"Oh ignorant, barbarous man!" politely exclaimed our scholar. "Know you not, then, the Theban Epaminondas; nor the harbour of Piræus; nor the name of the two horses of Achilles; nor that of Silenus's ass? Have you not heard of Jupiter, nor of Diogenes, nor of Laïs, nor of Cybele, nor-'

"I am much afraid," replied the man of letters, "that you know nothing at all of the ever memorable adventure of the celebrated Xixofou Concochigramki, nor of the mysteries of the great Fi Psi Hi Hi. But pray, what are the other unknown things of which this universal history treats?" The scholar then spoke for a quarter of an hour on the Roman commonwealth: but when he came to Julius Cæsar, the Chinese interrupted him, saying, "As for him, I think I know him: was he not a Turk?"

"The Jewish people!" exclaimed the Chinese. "Are they, then, masters of at least three quarters of the earth?""They flatter themselves that they shall one day be so," was the answer; "until which time they have the honour of being our old-clothes-men, and, now and then, clippers of our coin." "You jest," said the Chinese; "had these people ever a vast empire?"-"They had as their own for some years," said I, "a small country; but it is not by the extent of their states that a people are to be judged; as it is not by his riches that we are to esti-warm, "do you not at least know the mate a man."

"But is no other people spoken of in this book?" asked the man of letters. "Undoubtedly," returned a learned man who stood next me, and who constantly replied, "there is a deal said in it of a small country sixty leagues broad, called Eygpt, where it is asserted that there was a lake a hundred and fifty leagues round, cut by the hands of men."-"Zounds !" said the Chinese; "a lake a hundred and fifty leagues round in a country only sixty broad! That is fine, indeed!"-" Every body was wise in that country," added the doctor. "Oh! what fine times they must have been," said the Chinese. "But is that all?"-"No," replied the

"What!" said the scholar, somewhat

difference between Pagans, Christians, and Mussulmen? Do you not know Constantine, and the history of the popes?" "We have indistinctly heard," answered the Asiatic, "of one Mahomet."

"It is impossible," returned the other, "that you should not, at least, be acquainted with Luther, Zuinglius, Bellarmin, Ecolampades." "I shall never remember those names," said the Chinese. He then went away to sell a considerable parcel of tea and fine grogram, with which he bought two fine girls and a ship-boy, whom he took back to his own country, adoring Tien, and commending himself to Confucius.

For myself, who was present at this

conversation, I clearly saw what glory is ;
and I said,-Since Cæsar and Jupiter
are unknown in the finest, the most
ancient, the most extensive, the most
populous, and well-regulated kingdom
upon earth; it beseems you, ye governors
of some little country, ye preachers in
some little parish, or some little town,
ye doctors of Salamanca and of Bourges,
ye flimsy authors, and ye ponderous
commentators-it beseems you to make
pretensions to renown!

GOAT-SORCERY.

--

THE honours of every kind which antiquity paid to goats, would be very astonishing, if anything could astonish those who have grown a little familiar with the world, ancient and modern. The Egyptians and the Jews, often designated the kings and the chiefs of the people by the word goat. We find in Zachariah,

"Mine anger was kindled against the shepherds, and I punished the goats; for the Lord of Hosts hath visited his flock, the house of Judah, and hath made them as his goodly horse in the battle."

"Remove out of the midst of Babylon," says Jeremiah to the chiefs of the people; "go forth out of the land of the Chaldeans, and be as the he-goats before the flocks."

Isaiah, in chapters x. and xiv., uses the term goat, which has been translated prince.

The Egyptians went much farther than calling their kings goats; they consecrated a goat in Mendes, and it is even said that they adored him. The truth very likely was, that the people took an emblem for a divinity, as is but too often the case.

It is not likely that the Egyptian shoën or shotim—i. e. priests, immolated goats and worshipped them at the same time. We know that they had their goat Hazazel, which they adorned and crowned with flowers, and threw down headlong, as an expiation for the people; and that

the Jews took from them, not only this ceremony, but even the very name of Hazazel, as they adopted many other rites from Egypt.

But goats received another, and yet more singular honour. It is beyond a doubt, that in Egypt many women set the same example with goats, as Pasiphaë did with her bull.

The Jews but too faithfully imitated these abominations. Jeroboam instituted priests for the service of his calves and his goats.

The worship of the goat was established in Egypt, and in the lands of a part of Palestine. Enchantments were believed to be operated by means of goats, and other monsters, which were always repre{sented with a goat's head.

Magic, sorcery, soon passed from the east into the west, and extended itself throughout the earth. The sort of sorcery that came from the Jews, was called Sabbatum by the Romans, who thus confounded their sacred day with their secret abominations. Thence it was, that in the neighbouring nations, to be a sorcerer and to go to the sabbath, at least meant the same thing.

Wretched village women, deceived by knaves, and still more by the weakness of their own imaginations, believed that after pronouncing the word abraxa, and rubbing themselves with an ointment mixed with cow-dung and goat's hair, they went to the sabbath on a broomstick in their sleep, that there they adored a goat, and that he enjoyed them.

This opinion was universal. All the doctors asserted that it was the devil, who metamorphosed himself into a goat. This may be seen in Del Rio's Disquisitions, and in a hundred other authors. The theologian Grillandus, a great promoter of the Inquisition, quoted by Del Rio, says that sorcerers call the goat Martinet. He assures us that a woman who was attached to Martinet, mounted on his back, and was carried in an instant through the air to a place called the Nut of Benevento.

There were books in which the mys-{ teries of the sorcerers were written. I have seen one of them, at the head of which was a figure of a goat very badly drawn, with a woman on her knees behind him. In France, these books were called "grimoires ;" and in other countries" the devil's alphabet." That which I saw contained only four leaves in almost illegible characters, much like those of the Shepherd's Almanack.

66

GOD-GODS.

SECTION I.

THE reader cannot too carefully bear in mind that this Dictionary has not been written for the purpose of repeating what so many others have said.

The knowledge of a God is not impressed upon us by the hands of nature, for then men would all have the same idea; and no idea is born with us. It Reasoning and better education would does not come to us like the perception have sufficed in Europe for the extirpa- of light, of the ground, &c., which we tion of such an extravagance; but exe- receive as soon as our eyes and our uncutions were employed instead of reason-derstandings are opened. Is it a philoing. The pretended sorcerers had their sophical idea? No; men admitted the grimoire," and the judges had their existence of gods before there were phisorcerer's code. In 1599, the Jesuit Del{losophers. Rio, a doctor of Louvain, published his Magical Disquisitions: he affirms that all heretics are magicians, and frequently recommends that they be put to the torture. He has no doubt that the devil transforms himself into a goat, and grants his favours to all women presented to him. He quotes various juriconsults, called demonographers, who assert that Luther was the son of a woman and a goat. He assures us that at Brussels, in 1595, a woman was brought to bed of a child, of which the devil, disguised as a goat, was father; and that she was punished, but he does not inform us in what

manner.

Whence, then, is this idea derived? From feeling, and from that natural logic which unfolds itself with age, even in the rudest of mankind. Astonishing effects of nature were beheld-harvests and barrenness, fair weather and storms, benefits and scourges; and the hand of a master was felt. Chiefs were necessary to govern societies; and it was needful to admit sovereigns of these new sovereigns whom human weakness had given itself-beings before whose power these men who could bear down their fellowmen might tremble. The first sovereigns in their time employed these notions to cement their power. Such were the first steps; thus every little society had its god. These notions were rude because everything was rude. It is very natural to reason by analogy. One society under a chief did not deny that the neighbour

But the jurisprudence of witchcraft has been the most profoundly treated by one Boguet, "grand juge en dernier ressort" of an abbey of St. Claude in FrancheComté. He gives an account of all the executions to which he condemneding tribe should likewise have its judge, wizards and witches, and the number is very considerable. Nearly all the witches are supposed to have had commerce with the goat.

or its captain; consequently it could not deny that the other should also have its god. But as it was the interest of each tribe that its captain should be the best, It has already been said, that more it was also interested in believing, and than a hundred thousand sorcerers have consequently it did believe, that its god been executed in Europe. Philosophy was the mightiest. Hence those ancient alone has at length cured men of this fables which have so long been generally abominable delusion, and has taught diffused, that the gods of one nation judges that they should not burn the in-fought against the gods of another. Hence the numerous passages in the He

sane.

brew books, which we find constantly disclosing the opinion entertained by the Jews, that the gods of their enemies existed, but that they were inferior to the God of the Jews.

Meanwhile, in the great states where the progress of society allowed to individuals the enjoyment of speculative leisure, there were priests, magi, and philosophers.

Some of these perfected their reason so far as to acknowledge in secret one only and universal God. So, although the ancient Egyptians adored Osiri, Osiris, or rather Ösireth (which signifies this land is mine); though they also adored other superior beings, yet they admitted one Supreme, one only principal God, whom they called Knef, whose symbol was a sphere placed on the frontispiece of the temple.

After this model, the Greeks had their Zeus, their Jupiter, the master of the other gods, who were but what the angels are with the Babylonians and the Hebrews, and the saints with the Christians of the Roman communion.

My reason alone proves to me a Being who has arranged the matter of this world; but my reason is unable to prove to me that he made this matter,—that he brought it out of nothing. All the sages of antiquity, without exception, believed matter to be eternal, and subsisting by itself. All then that I can do, without the aid of superior light, is to believe that the God of this world is also eternal, and subsisting by himself. God and matter exist by the nature of things. May not other Gods exist, as well as other worlds! Whole nations, and very enlightened schools, have clearly admitted two gods in this world-one the source of good, the other the source of evil. They admitted an eternal war between two equal powers. Assuredly, nature can more easily suffer the existence of several independent beings in the immensity of space, than that of limited and powerless gods in this world, of whom one can do no good, and the other no harm.

If God and matter exist from all eternity, as antiquity believed, here then are two necessary beings; now, if there be It is a more thorny question than it two necessary beings, there may be thirty. has been considered, and one by no means These doubts alone, which are the germ profoundly examined,-whether several of an infinity of reflections, serve at least gods, equal in power, can exist at the to convince us of the feebleness of our same time? understanding. We must, with Cicero, We have no adequate idea of the Di-confess our ignorance of the nature of the vinity; we creep on from conjecture to Divinity; we shall never know any more conjecture, from likelihood to probability. of it than he did. We have very few certainties. There is In vain do the schools tell us, that God something; therefore there is something is infinite negatively and not privatelyeternal; for nothing is produced from" formaliter et non materialiter," that he nothing. Here is a certain truth on which the mind reposes. Every work which shows us means and an end, announces a workman: then this universe, composed of springs, of means, each of which has its end, discovers a most mighty, a most intelligent workman. Here is a probability approaching the greatest certainty. But is this Supreme Artificer infinite? Is he everywhere? Is he in one place? How are we, with our feeble intelligence and limited knowledge, to answer this question?

is the first act, the middle, and the lastthat he is everywhere without being in any place: a hundred pages of commentaries on definitions like these cannot give us the smallest light. We have no steps whereby to arrive at such knowledge.

We feel that we are under the hand of an invisible being; this is all: we cannot advance one step farther. It is mad temerity to seek to divine what this being is---whether he is extended or not, whether he is in one place or not, how he exists, or how he operates.