This conclusion has nothing in it surprising or extraordinary: it is the natural consequence of the establishment of a new worship. Miraculous facts, or rather what it is desired should be considered as such, diminish in a false religion, either in proportion as it becomes firmly established and has no longer occasion for them, or in proportion as it gradually becomes weaker and weaker, because they no longer obtain credit. The ardent but useless desire to pry into futurity gave birth to oracles; imposture encouraged and sanctioned them; and fanaticism set the seal; for an infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct. The poverty of the people, who had no longer anything left them to give; the imposture detected in many oracles, and thence naturally concluded to exist in all; and finally the edicts of the Christian emperors; such are the real causes of the establishment, and of the cessation, of this species of imposture. The introduction of an opposite state of circumstances into human affairs made it completely disappear; and oracles thus became involved in the vicissitudes accompanying all human institutions. Some limit themselves to observing that the birth of Jesus Christ is the first epoch of the cessation of oracles. But why, on such an occasion, should some demons have fled, while others remained? Besides, ancient history proves decidedly that many oracles had been destroyed before this birth. All the distinguished oracles of Greece no longer existed, or scarcely existed, and the oracle was occasionally interrupted by the silence of an honest priest who would not consent to deceive the people. "The oracle of Delphi," says Lucian, "remains dumb since princes have become afraid of futurity; they have prohibited the gods from speaking, and the gods have obeyed them." ORDEAL. It might be imagined that all the absurdities which degrade human nature were destined to come to us from Asia, the source at the same time of all the sciences and arts! It was in Asia and in Egypt that mankind first dared to make the life or death of a person accused, dependent on the throw of a die, or something equally unconnected with reason and decided by chance--on cold water or hot water, on red hot iron, or a bit of barley bread. Similar superstition, we are assured by travellers, still exists in the Indies, on the coast of Malabar, and in Japan. This superstition passed from Egypt into Greece. There was a very celebrated temple at Trezène in which every man who perjured himself died instantly of apoplexy. Hippolytus, in the tragedy of "Phædra," in the first scene of the fifth act, addresses the following lines to his mistress Aricia: