how they hang their noses over the smoke of sacrifices, saith [6516]Lucian, and lick blood like flies that was spilled about the altars.  Their carved idols, gilt images of wood, iron, ivory, silver, brass, stone, olim truncus eram, &c., were most absurd, as being their own workmanship; for as Seneca notes, adorant ligneos deos, et fabros interim qui fecerunt, contemnunt, they adore work, contemn the workman; and as Tertullian follows it, Si homines non essent diis propitii, non essent dii, had it not been for men, they had never been gods, but blocks, and stupid statues in which mice, swallows, birds make their nests, spiders their webs, and in their very mouths laid their excrements.  Those images, I say, were all out as gross as the shapes in which they did represent them:  Jupiter with a ram’s head, Mercury a dog’s, Pan like a goat, Heccate with three heads, one with a beard, another without; see more in Carterius and [6517]Verdurius of their monstrous forms and ugly pictures:  and, which was absurder yet, they told them these images came from heaven, as that of Minerva in her temple at Athens, quod e coelo cecidisse credebant accolae, saith Pausanias.  They formed some like storks, apes, bulls, and yet seriously believed:  and that which was impious and abominable, they made their gods notorious whoremasters, incestuous Sodomites (as commonly they were all, as well as Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Mercury, Neptune, &c.), thieves, slaves, drudges (for Apollo and Neptune made tiles in Phrygia), kept sheep, Hercules emptied stables, Vulcan a blacksmith, unfit to dwell upon the earth for their villainies, much less in heaven, as [6518]Mornay well saith, and yet they gave them out to be such; so weak and brutish, some to whine, lament, and roar, as Isis for her son and Cenocephalus, as also all her weeping priests; Mars in Homer to be wounded, vexed; Venus ran away crying, and the like; than which what can be more ridiculous? Nonne ridiculum lugere quod colas, vel colere quod lugeas? (which [6519]Minutius objects) Si dii, cur plangitis? si mortui, cur adoratis? that it is no marvel if [6520]Lucian, that adamantine persecutor of superstition, and Pliny could so scoff at them and their horrible idolatry as they did; if Diagoras took Hercules’ image, and put it under his pot to seethe his pottage, which was, as he said, his 13th labour.  But see more of their fopperies in Cypr. 4. tract, de Idol. varietat. Chrysostom advers.  Gentil. Arnobius adv.  Gentes. Austin, de civ. dei. Theodoret. de curat.  Graec. affect. Clemens Alexandrinus, Minutius Felix, Eusebius, Lactantius, Stuckius, &c.  Lamentable, tragical, and fearful those symptoms are, that they should be so far forth affrighted with their fictitious gods, as to spend the goods, lives, fortunes, precious time, best days in their honour, to [6521]sacrifice unto them, to their inestimable loss, such hecatombs, so many thousand sheep, oxen with gilded horns, goats,