Tully writes to Atticus, that his daughter Tulliola might be made a goddess, and adored as Juno and Minerva, and as well she deserved it. Their Holydays and adorations were all out as ridiculous; those Lupercals of Pan, Florales of Flora, Bona dea, Anna Perenna, Saturnals, &c. as how they were celebrated, with what lascivious and wanton gestures, bald ceremonies, by what bawdy Priests, how they hang their noses over the smoke of sacrifices, saith Lucian, and lick bloud like flies that was spilled about the altars.

Their carved Idols, gilt Images of wood, iron, ivory, silver, brass, stone, olim truncus eram, &c. were most absurd, as being their own workmanship; for as Seneca notes, adorant ligneos deos, & fabros interim qui fecerunt, contemnunt, they adore work, contemn the workman; and as Tertullian follows it, Si homines non essent diis propitii, non essent dii, had it not been for men, they had never been gods, but blocks still, and stupid statues, in which mice, swallows, birds made their nests, spiders their webbes, and in their very mouths laid their excrements.

Those Images I say were all out as gross, as the shapes in which they did represent them: Jupiter with a rams head, Mercury a doggs, Pan like a goat, Hecate with three heads, one with a beard, another without; see more in Carterius and Verdurius of their monstrous formes and ugly pictures: and which was absurder yet, they told them these Images came from heaven, as that of Minerva in her temple at Athens, quod è cœlo cecidisse credebant accolæ, saith Pausanias. They formed some like Storks, Apes, Buls, and yet seriously believed;

and that which was impious, and abominable, they made their Gods notorious whoremasters, incestious Sodomites, (as commonly they were all, as well as Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Mercury, Neptune, &c.) theeves, slaves, drudges, (for Apollo and Neptune, made tiles in Phrygia,) kept sheep, Hercules empty’d stables, Vulcan a black-smith, unfit to dwell upon the earth for their villanies, much less in heaven, as Mornay well saith, and yet they gave them out to be such;

so weak and brutish, some to whine, lament, and roare, as Isis for her son and Cenocephalus, as also all her weeping Priests; Mars in Homer to be wounded, vexed; Venus run away crying, and the like: then which, what can be more ridiculous? Nonne ridiculum lugere quod colas, vel colere quod lugeas? (which Minutius objects) Si dii, cur plangitis? si mortui, cur adoratis?

that it is no marvel if Lucian, that adamantine persequutor of superstition, and Pliny could so scoffe at them and their horrible Idolatry as they did: If Diagoras took Hercules Image, and put it under his pot to seeth his pottage, which was, as he said, his 13th labour.

But see more of their fopperies in Cypr. 4. tract. de Idol. varietat. Chrysostome advers. Gentil. Arnobius adv. Gentes. L. Austin. de civ. dei. Theodoret. de curat. Græc. affect. Clemens Alexandrinus, Minutius Felix, Eusebius, Lactantius, Stuckius, &c.

Lamentable, tragical, and fearful these Symptomes are; that they should be so far forth affrighted with their fictitious Gods, as to spend the goods, lives, fortunes, precious time, best dayes in their honour, to Sacrifice unto them, to their inestimable loss, such Hecatombes, so many thousand sheep, Oxen, with gilded horns, Goats, as Crœsus King of Lydia, Marcus Julianus, surnamed ob crebras hostias Victimarius, & Tauricremus, and the rest of the Roman Emperours usually did with such labour and cost:

and not Emperours only and great ones pro communi bono, were at this charge, but private men for their ordinary occasions. Pythagoras offered an hundred Oxen for the invention of a Geometrical Probleme, and it was an ordinary thing to sacrifice in Lucians time, a heifer for their good health, four Oxen for wealth, an hundred for a Kingdom, nine Buls for their safe return from Troja to Pylus, &c.

Every God almost had a peculiar sacrifice, the Sun horses, Vulcan fire, Diana a white Hart, Venus a Turtle, Ceres an hog, Proserpina a black lamb, Neptune a bull, (read more in Stukius at large) besides sheep, cocks, corals, frankincense, to their undoings, as if their gods were affected with bloud or smoke.

And surely (saith he) if one should but repeat the fopperies of mortall men, in their sacrifices, feasts, worshipping their Gods, their rites and ceremonies, what they think of them, of their diet, houses, orders, &c. what prayers and vowes they make; if one should but observe their absurditie and madness, he would burst out a laughing, and pitie their folly.

For what can be more absurd than their ordinary prayers, petitions, requests, sacrifices, oracles, devotions? of which we have a taste in Maximus Tyrius serm.1. Plato’s Alcibiades Secundus, Persius Sat.2. Juvenal. Sat.10. there likewise exploded,

Mactant opimas & pingues hostias deo quasi esurienti, profundunt vina tanquam sitienti, lumina accendunt velut in tenebris agenti (Lactantius lib.2. cap.6.) as if their Gods were an hungrie, a thirst, in the dark, they light candles, offer meat and drink.

And what so base as to reveal their counsels and give oracles è viscerum sterquiliniis, out of the bowels and excrementall parts of beasts? sordidos Deos Varro truely cals them therefore, and well he might. I say nothing of their magnificent and sumptuous temples, those majestical structures: To the roof of Apollo Didymeus Temple, ad Branchidas, as Strabo writes, a thousand okes did not suffice.

Who can relate the glorious splendor, and stupend magnificence, the sumptuous building of Diana at Ephesus, Jupiter Ammons Temple in Afrike, the Pantheon at Rome, the Capitoll, the Sarapium at Alexandria, Apollos Temple at Daphne in the Suburbs of Antioch. The great Temple at Mexico so richly adorned, and so capacious (for 10000 men might stand in it at once) that fair Pantheon of Cusco, described by Acosta in his Indian History, which ecclipses both Jews and Christians.

There were in old Jerusalem as some write, 408 Synagogues; but new Cairo reckons up (if Radzinilus may be beleeved) 6800 meskites. Fessa 400, whereof 50 are most magnificent, like Saint Pauls in London. Helena built 300 fair Churches in the holy Land, but one Bassa hath built 400 meskites.

The Mahometans have 1000 Monks in a Monastery; the like saith Acosta of Americans; Riccius of the Chineses, for men and women, fairly built; and more richly endowed some of them, then Arras in Artois, Fulda in Germany, or Saint Edmunds-Bury in England with us: who can describe those curious and costlie statues, Idols, Images, so frequently mentioned in Pausanias?

I conceal their donaries, pendants, other offerings, presents, to these their fictitious Gods daily consecrated. Alexander the son of Amyntas, K. of Macedonia, sent two statues of pure gold to Apollo at Delphos. Crœsus king of Lydia dedicated an hundreth golden tiles in the same place, with a golden altar: No man came empty-handed to their Shrines.

But these are base offerings in respect; they offered men themselves alive: The Leucadians, as Strabo writes, sacrificed every yeer a man, averruncandæ deorum iræ causa, to pacifie their Gods, de montis præcipitio dejecerunt, &c. and they did voluntarily undergo it. The Decii did so sacrifice Diis manibus, Curtius did leap into the gulf.

Were they not all strangely deluded to go so far to their Oracles, to be so gulled by them, both in war and peace, as Polybius relates, (which their Augures, Priests, Vestall Virgins can witness) to be so superstitious, that they would rather lose goods and lives, then omit any ceremonies, or offend their Heathen gods? Nicias that generous and valiant captain of the Greeks, overthrew the Athenian Navy, by reason of his too much superstition, because the Augures told him it was ominous to set sail from the haven of Syracuse whilest the Moon was ecclipsed, he tarried so long till his enemies besieged him, he and all his army was overthrown.

The Parthians of old were so sottish in this kinde, they would rather lose a victorie, nay lose their own lives, then fight in the night, ’twas against their religion. The Jewes would make no resistance on the Sabbath, when Pompeius besieged Jerusalem; and some Jewish Christians in Africk, set upon by the Gothes, suffered themselves upon the same occasion to be utterly vanquished.