their outward forms of worship, could not easily enter into the spirit of it. And yet if we bring together the few short sketches which these different writers have preserved of it, if we correct them by one another, if we compare their accounts with those of the ancient poets and historians of these nations themfelves, I flatter myself, we shall throw light enough upon this subject to be able to distinguish the most important objects in it.
The religion of the Scythians was, in the first ages, extremely simple. It taught a few plain easy doctrines, and these seem to have comprized the whole of religion known to the first inhabitants of Europe. The farther back we ascend to the aera of the creation, the more plainly we discover traces of this conformity among the several nations of the earth; but in proportion as we see them dispersed to form distant settlements and colonies, they seem to swerve from their original ideas, and to assume new forms of religion. The nations, who settled in the southern countries, were they who altered it the first, and afterwards disfigured it the most. These people derive from their climate a lively, fruitful, and restless imagination, which makes them greedy of novelties and wonders: they have
