In their secret doctrines, the philosophers and priests of antiquity admitted no miraculous powers; and when they said that a certain thing was done by a god, or "the gods," they were merely using words suited to the capacity of the multitude, while the mystic or esoteric meaning was, that the thing arose from the concatenation of natural causes and effects, or the eternal order of necessity; and not, as the ignorant imagine, that the laws of nature were suspended by the interference of some personified god. With the above two classes of the initiated, all their mysteries were rooted in, and had constant allusion to zodiacal objects, and the physical powers of Nature; which objects and powers were, by the prosopopoeia, converted into abstract existences, called gods and goddesses. This was done by all the priests of antiquity, as their varied schemes of superstition gained footing so as to foster ignorance and mental blindness amongst their dupes; and herein they were imitated by their successors, the Christians, who likewise claimed a power in their gods, to suspend or make infractions in the unalterable course of Nature. Judaism was a barbarous version of some of the beautiful and lively fables of the Pagans; and the present superstition of Europe is a rude polytheistical caricature of the whole. The miracle-working Deity of the Jews appears to have been of Egyptian extraction; and had his prototype in the god _Jahouh_, who held a high rank in the polytheism of the Thebans. This Jahouh was a personification of that power which giveth forms to matter (viz., motion), and organises animal and vegetable life, _alias_ soul of the world. Moses, who is said to have been a priest of Isis, or Nature, the secret of whose mysteries was the unity of the supreme Power,* seems to have been wishful of preserving that unity in the Deity he had borrowed of the Thebans, as is stated by Strabo, in his Geography,** who informs us that Moses taught his followers to worship the god Jahouh _without representing it by emblem_. * Moses borrowed this of the Egyptians. Cudworth, in his Intellectual System, and Hyde, in his treatise on the religion of the Persians, acknowledge that the unity of God was the foundation of the religion of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Persians. ** Strabo's account is corroborated by his contemporary, Diodorus Siculus, and also by Plutarch. Diodorus's account of Moses not being-agreeable to the Church, has been suppressed.--See Translation of the Abbé Terrasson. There can be no doubt as to the identity of this name and that of Jehovah. That Moses adopted this deity, and that the name when first introduced, was new to the Jews, appears from Exod. vi., 3. Neither Philo nor Josephus deny that the Jews borrowed circumcision from the Egyptians; why, then, might they not borrow a god also?*