Some writers among the moderns, because the Druids ordinarily made no use of images in their worship, have given into an opinion that their religion was founded on the unity of the Godhead.  But this is no just consequence.  The spirituality of the idea, admitting their idea to have been spiritual, does not infer the unity of the object.  All the ancient authors who speak of this order agree, that, besides those great and more distinguishing objects of their worship already mentioned they had gods answerable to those adored by the Romans.  And we know that the Northern nations, who overran the Roman Empire, had in fact a great plurality of gods, whose attributes, though not their names, bore a close analogy to the idols of the Southern world.

The Druids performed the highest act of religion by sacrifice, agreeably to the custom of all other nations.  They not only offered up beasts, but even human victims:  a barbarity almost universal in the heathen world, but exercised more uniformly, and with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, amongst those nations where the religion of the Druids prevailed.  They held that the life of a man was the only atonement for the life of a man.  They frequently inclosed a number of wretches, some captives, some criminals, and, when these were wanting, even innocent victims, in a gigantic statue of wicker-work, to which they set fire, and invoked their deities amidst the horrid cries and shrieks of the sufferers, and the shouts of those who assisted at this tremendous rite.

There were none among the ancients more eminent for all the arts of divination than the Druids.  Many of the superstitious practices in use to this day among the country people for discovering their future fortune seem to be remains of Druidism.  Futurity is the great concern of mankind.  Whilst the wise and learned look back upon experience and history, and reason from things past about events to come, it is natural for the rude and ignorant, who have the same desires without the same reasonable means of satisfaction, to inquire into the secrets of futurity, and to govern their conduct by omens, dreams, and prodigies.  The Druids, as well as the Etruscan and Roman priesthood, attended with diligence the flight of birds, the pecking of chickens, and the entrails of their animal sacrifices.  It was obvious that no contemptible prognostics of the weather were to be taken from certain motions and appearances in birds and beasts.[13] A people who lived mostly in the open air must have been well skilled in these observations.  And as changes in the weather influenced much the fortune of their huntings or their harvests, which were all their fortunes, it was easy to apply the same prognostics to every event by a transition very natural and common; and thus probably arose the science of auspices, which formerly guided the deliberations of councils and the motions of armies, though now they only serve, and scarcely serve, to amuse the vulgar.