e 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 prob