XXVI. To this I answer in the first place, that although errors in matters of religion are the worst of all errors, they are no absolute proofs of the rudeness of those who assent to them. Nobody is ignorant, that the antient Greeks and Romans, who were exceedingly well skilled in arts and sciences, were extremely absurd with respect to the objects of their adoration. They worshiped as deities, men who had been adulterers, perfidious, and guilty of all sorts of wickedness. Rome, which as Saint Leon observes, domineered over all the other nations, was herself under the dominion of the errors of them all. When a man sets himself to search for a divinity from among his own species, it is a mark of a depraved imagination, and the question respecting his capacity, is not worth enquiring into, as we may naturally conclude, he has lost his reason before he makes the attempt. And he who walks blindfold, is not more terrified by a high precipice than a low one, as he is unable to discern the difference. I do not even know, whether when a man first begins to err in these particulars, he does not go the most extravagant lengths, who has been the best-informed; because in matters of religion, when the first error has taken root, it is easy for the person who is possessed with it, to confound the mysterious with the ridiculous, and by an affected subtilty, pretend to discover some hidden signs of divinity in those things, which in the eye of common sense, are the most remote from, or have the least to do with it. XXVII. I answer secondly, that we have no certainty, that the idolatry of these various nations was so gross as it has been represented. With respect to the antient idolaters, some learned men have enforced this doubt very strongly, and have insisted, that there were solid reasons for supposing, that in the image they did not worship the wood, the metal, or the marble of which it was made, but some good genius or demon, whom they believed to have resided in it. Truly it seems incredible, that a statuary, such a one as Horace humourously describes in one of his Satyrs, should stand with his hatchet in one hand, and having the other on the wood he was about to work, suspended and perplexed, whether he should carve the God Priapus, or Escanus; I say it is incredible, that such a man should suppose himself vested with sufficient authority to fabricate a Deity.