Such were the source and origin of the religion of the ancients; truly worthy of man, had he been capable of persisting in the purity and simplicity of these first principles: but the errors of the mind, and the vices of the heart, those sad effects of the corruption of human nature, have strangely disfigured their original beauty. There are still some faint rays, some brilliant sparks of light, which a general depravity has not been able to extinguish utterly; but they are incapable of dispelling the profound darkness of the gloom which prevails almost universally, and presents nothing to view but absurdities, follies, extravagancies, licentiousness, and disorder; in a word, a hideous chaos of frantic excesses and enormous vices. Can any thing be more admirable than these principles laid down by Cicero?(52) That we ought above all things to be convinced that there is a Supreme Being, who presides over all the events of the world, and disposes every thing as sovereign lord and arbiter: that it is to him mankind are indebted for all the good they enjoy: that he penetrates into, and is conscious of, whatever passes in the most secret recesses of our hearts: that he treats the just and the impious according to their respective merits: that the true means of acquiring his favour, and of being pleasing in his sight, is not by employing of riches and magnificence in the worship that is paid to him, but by presenting him with a heart pure and blameless, and by adoring him with an unfeigned and profound veneration. Sentiments so sublime and religious were the result of the reflections of some few who employed themselves in the study of the heart of man, and had recourse to the first principles of his institution, of which they still retained some valuable relics. But the whole system of their religion, the tendency of their public feasts and ceremonies, the essence of the Pagan theology, of which the poets were the only teachers and professors, the very example of the gods, whose violent passions, scandalous adventures, and abominable crimes, were celebrated in their hymns or odes, and proposed in some measure to the imitation, as well as adoration, of the people; these were certainly very unfit means to enlighten the minds of men, and to form them to virtue and morality. It is remarkable, that in the greatest solemnities of the Pagan religion, and in their most sacred and venerable mysteries, far from perceiving any thing which can recommend virtue, piety, or the practice of the most essential duties of ordinary life, we find the authority of laws, the imperious power of custom, the presence of magistrates, the assembly of all orders of the state, the example of fathers and mothers, all conspire to train up a whole nation from their infancy in an impure and sacrilegious worship, under the name, and in a manner under the sanction, of religion itself; as we shall soon see in the sequel.