“These ideas, analogous to the condition of their inventors, were for a long time confused and ill-digested.  Savage men, wandering in the woods, beset with wants and destitute of resources, had not the leisure to combine principles and draw conclusions; affected with more evils than they found pleasures, their most habitual sentiment was that of fear, their theology terror; their worship was confined to a few salutations and offerings to beings whom they conceived as greedy and ferocious as themselves.  In their state of equality and independence, no man offered himself as mediator between men and gods as insubordinate and poor as himself.  No one having superfluities to give, there existed no parasite by the name of priest, no tribute by the name of victim, no empire by the name of altar.  Their dogmas and their morals were the same thing, it was only self-preservation; and religion, that arbitrary idea, without influence on the mutual relations of men, was a vain homage rendered to the visible powers of nature.

“Such was the necessary and original idea of God.”

And the orator, addressing himself to the savage nations, continued: 

“We appeal to you, men who have received no foreign and factitious ideas; tell us, have you ever gone beyond what I have described?  And you, learned doctors, we call you to witness; is not this the unanimous testimony of all ancient monuments?*

* It clearly results, says Plutarch, from the verses of Orpheus and the sacred books of the Egyptians and Phrygians, that the ancient theology, not only of the Greeks, but of all nations, was nothing more than a system of physics, a picture of the operations of nature, wrapped up in mysterious allegories and enigmatical symbols, in a manner that the ignorant multitude attended rather to their apparent than to their hidden meaning, and even in what they understood of the latter, supposed there to be something more deep than what they perceived.  Fragment of a work of Plutarch now lost, quoted by Eusebius, Proepar.  Evang. lib. 3, ch. 1, p. 83.

The majority of philosophers, says Porphyry, and among others Haeremon (who lived in Egypt in the first age of Christianity), imagine there never to have been any other world than the one we see, and acknowledged no other Gods of all those recognized by the Egyptians, than such as are commonly called planets, signs of the Zodiac, and constellations; whose aspects, that is, rising and setting, are supposed to influence the fortunes of men; to which they add their divisions of the signs into decans and dispensers of time, whom they style lords of the ascendant, whose names, virtues in relieving distempers, rising, setting, and presages of future events, are the subjects of almanacs (for be it observed, that the Egyptian priests had almanacs the exact counterpart of Matthew Lansberg’s); for when the priests affirmed that the sun was the architect of the universe, Chaeremon presently concludes