This obscurity and weakness oblige him to have recourse to a superior knowledge and power: he is forced, both by his immediate wants, and the strong desire he has to succeed in all his undertakings, to address that Being who he is sensible has reserved to himself alone the knowledge of futurity, and the power of disposing it as he sees fitting. He accordingly directs prayers, makes vows, and offers sacrifices, to prevail, if possible, with the Deity, to reveal himself, either in dreams, in oracles, or other signs which may manifest his will; fully convinced that nothing can happen but by the divine appointment; and that it is a man’s greatest interest to know this supreme will, in order to conform his actions to it. This religious principle of dependence on, and veneration of, the Supreme Being, is natural to man: it is imprinted deep in his heart; he is reminded of it, by the inward sense of his extreme indigence, and by all the objects which surround him; and it may be affirmed, that this perpetual recourse to the Deity, is one of the principal foundations of religion and the strongest band by which man is united to his Creator. Those who were so happy as to know the true God, and were chosen to be his peculiar people, never failed to address him in all their wants and doubts, in order to obtain his succour, and to know his will. He accordingly vouchsafed to reveal himself to them; to conduct them by apparitions, dreams, oracles, and prophecies; and to protect them by miracles of the most astonishing kind. But those who were so blind as to substitute falsehood in the place of truth, directed themselves, for the like aid, to fictitious and deceitful deities, who were not able to answer their expectations, nor recompense the homage that mortals paid them, any otherwise than by error and illusion, and a fraudulent imitation of the conduct of the true God. Hence arose the vain observation of dreams, which, from a superstitious credulity, they mistook for salutary warnings from Heaven; those obscure and equivocal answers of oracles, beneath whose veil the spirits of darkness concealed their ignorance; and, by a studied ambiguity, reserved to themselves an evasion or subterfuge, whatever might be the event. To this are owing the prognostics with regard to futurity, which men fancied they should find in the entrails of beasts, in the flight and singing of birds, in the aspect of the planets, in fortuitous accidents, and in the caprice of chance; those dreadful prodigies that filled a whole nation with terror, and which, it was believed, nothing could expiate but mournful ceremonies, and even sometimes the effusion of human blood: in fine, those black inventions of magic, those delusions, enchantments, sorceries, invocations of ghosts, and many other kinds of divination.