( vii )
which they would probably still have cultivated had they been left for ever to themselves, and continued plunged in their original darkness: This is the Religion, which (if I may be allowed to say so) our climate, our constitutions, our very wants are adapted to and inspire: For who can deny, but that in the false religions, there are a thousand things relative to these different objects? It is, in short, this Religion, of which Christianity (though after a long conflict, it triumphed over it) could never totally eradicate the vestiges.
We may reasonably inquire how it comes to pass that the Paganism of Greece and Rome ingrosses all our attention, while there are so few, even among the learned, who have any notion of the Religion I am speaking of? Hath this preference been owing to any natural superiority either in the precepts or worship of these learned nations? Or do they afford subjects for more satisfactory researches than those of the northern nations? What indeed are they, after all, but a chaos of indistinct and confused opinions, and of customs indiscriminately borrowed and picked up from all other religions, void of all connection and coherence; and where, amidst eternal contradictions and obscurities, one has some difficulty to trace out a few bright rays of
