se tamen
non defendit hic Deus. Qui fieri potest, ut sit integer in singulis hostiae
particulis, idem corpus numero, tam multis locis, caelo, terra_, &c. But he
that shall read the [6500]Turks' Alcoran, the Jews' Talmud, and papists'
golden legend, in the mean time will swear that such gross fictions,
fables, vain traditions, prodigious paradoxes and ceremonies, could never
proceed from any other spirit, than that of the devil himself, which is the
author of confusion and lies; and wonder withal how such wise men as have
been of the Jews, such learned understanding men as Averroes, Avicenna, or
those heathen philosophers, could ever be persuaded to believe, or to
subscribe to the least part of them: _aut fraudem non detegere_: but that
as [6501]Vanninus answers, _ob publicae, potestatis formidinem allatrare
philosophi non audebant_, they durst not speak for fear of the law. But I
will descend to particulars: read their several symptoms and then guess.

Of such symptoms as properly belong to superstition, or that irreligious
religion, I may say as of the rest, some are ridiculous, some again feral
to relate. Of those ridiculous, there can be no better testimony than the
multitude of their gods, those absurd names, actions, offices they put upon
them, their feasts, holy days, sacrifices, adorations, and the like. The
Egyptians that pretended so great antiquity, 300 kings before Amasis: and
as Mela writes, 13,000 years from the beginning of their chronicles, that
bragged so much of their knowledge of old, for they invented arithmetic,
astronomy, geometry: of their wealth and power, that vaunted of 20,000
cities: yet at the same time their idolatry and superstition was most
gross: they worshipped, as Diodorus Siculus records, sun and moon under the
name of Isis and Osiris, and after, such men as were beneficial to them, or
any creature that did them good. In the city of Bubasti they adored a cat,
saith Herodotus. Ibis and storks, an ox: (saith Pliny) [6502]leeks and
onions, Macrobius,

[6503] "Porrum et caepe deos imponere nubibus ausi,
Hos tu Nile deos colis."------

Scoffing [6504]Lucian in his _vera Historia_: which, as he confesseth
himself, was not persuasively written as a truth, but in comical fashion to
glance at the monstrous fictions and gross absurdities of writers and
nations, to deride without doubt this prodigious Egyptian idolatry, feigns
this story of himself: that when he had seen the Elysian field