Thus was nearly all America found to be divided into a multitude of petty tribes, each having its protecting god. The Mexicans, too, and the Peruvians, forming great nations, had only one god--the one adoring Manco Capak, the other the god of war. The Mexicans called their warlike divinity "_Huitzilipochtli_," as the Hebrews had called their Lord "_Sabaoth_." It was not from a superior and cultivated reason that every people thus began with acknowledging one only Divinity; had they been philosophers, they would have adored the God of all nature, and not the god of a village; they would have examined those infinite relations among all things which prove a Being creating and preserving; but they examined nothing--they felt. Such is the progress of our feeble understanding. Each village would feel its weakness and its need of a protector; it would imagine that tutelary and terrible being residing in the neighboring forest, or on a mountain, or in a cloud. It would imagine only one, because the clan had but one chief in war; it would imagine that one corporeal, because it was impossible to represent it otherwise. It could not believe that the neighboring tribe had not also its god. Therefore it was that Jephthah said to the inhabitants of Moab: "You possess lawfully what your god Chemoth has made you conquer; you should, then, let us enjoy what our god has given us by his victories." This language, used by one stranger to other strangers, is very remarkable. The Jews and the Moabites had dispossessed the natives of the country; neither had any right but that of force; and the one says to the other: "Your god has protected you in your usurpation; suffer our god to protect us in ours." Jeremiah and Amos both ask what right the god Melchem had to seize the country of Gad? From these passages it is evident that the ancients attributed to each country a protecting god. We find other traces of this theology in Homer. It is very natural that, men's imaginations being heated, and their minds having acquired some confused knowledge, they should soon multiply their gods, and speedily assign protectors to the elements, the seas, the forests, the fountains, and the fields. The more they observed the stars, the more they would be struck with admiration. How, indeed, should they have adored the divinity of a brook, and not have adored the sun? The first step being taken, the earth would soon be covered with gods; and from the stars men would at last come down to cats and onions. Reason, however, will advance towards perfection; time at length found philosophers who saw that neither onions, nor cats, nor even the stars, had arranged the order of nature. All those philosophers--Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Scythians, Greeks, and Romans--admitted a supreme, rewarding, and avenging God.