so
continuate, so general, so destructive, so violent.

In this superstitious row, Jews for antiquity may go next to Gentiles: what
of old they have done, what idolatries they have committed in their groves
and high places, what their Pharisees, Sadducees, Scribes, Essei, and such
sectaries have maintained, I will not so much as mention: for the present,
I presume no nation under heaven can be more sottish, ignorant, blind,
superstitious, wilful, obstinate, and peevish, tiring themselves with vain
ceremonies to no purpose; he that shall but read their Rabbins' ridiculous
comments, their strange interpretation of scriptures, their absurd
ceremonies, fables, childish tales, which they steadfastly believe, will
think they be scarce rational creatures; their foolish [6548]customs, when
they rise in the morning, and how they prepare themselves to prayer, to
meat, with what superstitious washings, how to their Sabbath, to their
other feasts, weddings, burials, &c. Last of all, the expectation of their
Messiah, and those figments, miracles, vain pomp that shall attend him, as
how he shall terrify the Gentiles, and overcome them by new diseases; how
Michael the archangel shall sound his trumpet, how he shall gather all the
scattered Jews in the Holy Land, and there make them a great banquet,
[6549] "Wherein shall be all the birds, beasts, fishes, that ever God made,
a cup of wine that grew in Paradise, and that hath been kept in Adam's
cellar ever since." At the first course shall be served in that great ox in
Job iv. 10., "that every day feeds on a thousand hills," Psal. 1. 10., that
great Leviathan, and a great bird, that laid an egg so big, [6550]"that by
chance tumbling out of the nest, it knocked down three hundred tall cedars,
and breaking as it fell, drowned one hundred and sixty villages:" this bird
stood up to the knees in the sea, and the sea was so deep, that a hatchet
would not fall to the bottom in seven years: of their Messiah's [6551]wives
and children; Adam and Eve, &c., and that one stupend fiction amongst the
rest: when a Roman prince asked of rabbi Jehosua ben Hanania, why the Jews'
God was compared to a lion; he made answer, he compared himself to no
ordinary lion, but to one in the wood Ela, which, when he desired to see,
the rabbin prayed to God he might, and forthwith the lion set forward.
[6552] "But when he was four hundred miles from Rome he so roared that all
the great-bellied women in Rome made abortio