is the drift of religion to make us like him whom we worship:  what shall be the end of idolaters, but to degenerate into stocks and stones? of such as worship these heathen gods, for dii gentium daemonia, [6545]but to become devils themselves?  ’Tis therefore exitiosus error, et maxime periculosus, a most perilous and dangerous error of all others, as [6546]Plutarch holds, turbulenta passio hominem consternans, a pestilent, a troublesome passion, that utterly undoeth men.  Unhappy superstition, [6547]Pliny calls it, morte non finitur, death takes away life, but not superstition.  Impious and ignorant are far more happy than they which are superstitious, no torture like to it, none so continuate, so general, so destructive, so violent.

In this superstitious row, Jews for antiquity may go next to Gentiles:  what of old they have done, what idolatries they have committed in their groves and high places, what their Pharisees, Sadducees, Scribes, Essei, and such sectaries have maintained, I will not so much as mention:  for the present, I presume no nation under heaven can be more sottish, ignorant, blind, superstitious, wilful, obstinate, and peevish, tiring themselves with vain ceremonies to no purpose; he that shall but read their Rabbins’ ridiculous comments, their strange interpretation of scriptures, their absurd ceremonies, fables, childish tales, which they steadfastly believe, will think they be scarce rational creatures; their foolish [6548]customs, when they rise in the morning, and how they prepare themselves to prayer, to meat, with what superstitious washings, how to their Sabbath, to their other feasts, weddings, burials, &c.  Last of all, the expectation of their Messiah, and those figments, miracles, vain pomp that shall attend him, as how he shall terrify the Gentiles, and overcome them by new diseases; how Michael the archangel shall sound his trumpet, how he shall gather all the scattered Jews in the Holy Land, and there make them a great banquet, [6549] “Wherein shall be all the birds, beasts, fishes, that ever God made, a cup of wine that grew in Paradise, and that hath been kept in Adam’s cellar ever since.”  At the first course shall be served in that great ox in Job iv. 10., “that every day feeds on a thousand hills,” Psal. 1. 10., that great Leviathan, and a great bird, that laid an egg so big, [6550]"that by chance tumbling out of the nest, it knocked down three hundred tall cedars, and breaking as it fell, drowned one hundred and sixty villages:”  this bird stood up to the knees in the sea, and the sea was so deep, that a hatchet would not fall to the bottom in seven years:  of their Messiah’s [6551]wives and children; Adam and Eve, &c., and that one stupend fiction amongst the rest:  when a Roman prince asked of rabbi Jehosua ben Hanania, why the Jews’ God was compared to a lion; he made answer, he compared himself to no ordinary lion, but to one in the wood Ela, which, when he desired to see,