XIX. The modern idolators, are not less blind than the antient ones. The devil is worshiped in his own proper name by many people. In Pegu, a kingdom in the Peninsula of India, although they worship God as the author of all good, they pay more adoration to the devil, whom they believe to be the author of all evil. Some people in the train of the ambassador, whom Peter the Great, late Czar of Muscovy, sent to China, met in the way an idolatrous priest praying, and they asked him whom he worshiped? To which he answered in a magisterial tone, I worship a God whom the God you worship cast down from heaven, but after awhile my God will throw yours down from heaven, and then will be seen great changes among the sons of men. They must in that region have had some account of the fall of Lucifer; but they may wait long enough for a redeemer, if they stay till their deity returns to heaven. From as ridiculous a motive, the Jedices, a sect in Persia, never curse the devil, and that is, that one day or other he may make his peace with God, and then may revenge all the affronts they offer him.
XX. In the kingdom of Siam, they worship a white elephant, and four Mandarines are appointed constantly to attend him, who serve him with his meat and his drink, in a vessel of gold. In the Island of Ceylon, they worshiped a tooth, which was pretended to have fallen from the mouth of God; but Constantine de Bergania, a Portuguese, having got possession of it, burnt it, to the great disgrace of the priests who had invented the fable. The Indians of Honduras, worshiped a slave; but neither the divinity nor the life of the poor creature lasted long, for he died within a year, after which, they made a sacrifice of his body, and substituted another in his place: but their believing, that he who could not redeem himself from the confinement and restraint, in which, by way of security they kept him, could make others happy, was ridiculous enough. In the Southern Tartary, they worship a man who they think is eternal, having been made to believe so by the artifices of the priests appointed to his service. They only shew him in a private place of the palace or temple, surrounded by a number of lamps, and they always by way of precaution, in case he should die, keep another man secreted, who is much like him, that he may be ready to take his place, and seem as if he was still the same man. They call him Lama, which signifies Father eternal, and such is their veneration for him, that their greatest men procure by rich presents a part of his excrements, which they put into a gold box, and wear it suspended from their necks, as a precious relic. But no superstition appears to me more extravagant, than what is practised at Balia, an Island in the Indian Sea, to the eastward of Java, where every man has his separate God, which he fixes upon just as his caprice dictates, either the trunk of a tree, a stone, or a brute, and many of them change their Gods every day, for they are allowed this liberty, and often worship for the day the first thing they meet going out of their houses in a morning.
SECT. VII.
XXI. What shall I say of the ridiculous historical tales, which are venerated in some nations as irrefragable traditions? The Arcadians compute their origin to be antecedent to the creation of the Moon. The people of Peru maintain their kings to be legitimate descendants from the sun. The Arabs believe as an article of faith, the existence of a bird, which they call Anca Megareb, of such an enormous size, that its eggs are as big as large hills; which bird they say was afterwards cursed by their Prophet Handal, for having insulted him, and that it now lives retired in a certain inaccessible Island. The credit of an imaginary hero called Cherderles, is not less established among the Turks; they say he was one of Alexander’s captains, and that having made himself and his horse immortal by drinking of the waters of a certain river, he now goes about exploring the world, and assisting such soldiers as invoke him; they seem very happy with this delusion, and near a little Mosque appropriated to his worship, they shew the tombs of the nephew and the servant of this knight errant, and they add, that by their intercession continual miracles are wrought in that quarter.
XXII. In short, if you scrutinize country by country, the whole intellectual map of the globe, except only those places where the name of Christ is worshiped, you will find all this extensive surface, covered with spots and stains. Every country is an Africa to engender monsters; every province, an Iberia to produce poisons; in all places, as in Lycia, they invent chimeras; and in all nations, where the light of the gospel is wanting, they are obscured with as dark mists, as formerly obscured Egypt. There are no people whatever, who have not much of the barbarous. What results from this? why that the voice of the people is totally destitute of authority, because we see it so frequently posted on the side of error. Every one considers as infallible, the sentiment that prevails in his own country; upon this principle, that every body says so, and every body thinks so. Who are these every bodies? All the people in the world? Not so, because in other places, they think and say the contrary. But is not mankind the same in one place as another? why then should truth be more attached to the voice of this people, than of that people? Why because this is my country, and the other is a foreign one;—good reasoning!
SECT. VIII.
XXIII. I never observed, that the dogmatic writers, who in various manners, have conclusively proved the evident credibility of our holy faith, have introduced as one of their arguments, the consent of many nations in their belief of those mysteries; but have laid great stress, upon the consent of men, eminent for their sanctity and wisdom. The first argument would be favourable to idolatry, and the Mahomedan Sect; the second cannot be answered, nor can it be used to militate on the other side; and in case they should oppose to us the authority of the antient philosophers, who have been the partizans of idolatry, the objection would be grounded on a false supposition, it being established by irrefragable testimony, that those philosophers in matters of religion did not think with the people. Marcus Varus, one of the wisest of the Romans, distinguished among the Antients three kinds of Theology; the Natural, the Civil, and the Poetical. The first existed in the minds of wise men; the second was used to govern the religion of the people at large; the third was the invention of the poets; and of all the three, the philosophers held only the first to be true. The distinction of the two first, had been pointed out by Aristotle, in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics, cap. 8, where he says, that from the opinions of preceding ages which have been communicated to us respecting the Gods, may be inferred, they held some things to be true, and others false, and that the last were invented for the use and civil government of the populace: Cætera vero fabulosè ad multitudinis persuasionem. It is true, that although those philosophers were not of the same sentiment with the people, they generally talked their language, as an opposite conduct would have been very hazardous; for whoever denied the plurality of Gods, was looked upon as impious; as it happened to Socrates. The sum of the whole of this is, that in the voice of the people was contained all the error; and that the little or much which existed of truth, was shut up and imprisoned in the minds of a few wise men.
XXIV. After all that has been said, I shall conclude, by pointing out two senses, in which only, and in no other whatever, is contained the truth of the maxim, “that the voice of the people is the voice of God.” The first is, taking for the voice of the people, the unanimous consent of all God’s people; that is, of the universal church, which it is certain cannot err in matters of faith; nor through any antecedent impossibility which may be inferred from the nature of things, but by means of the interposition of the holy spirit, with which, according to the promise made by Christ, it will be constantly assisted. I said all God’s people, because a large portion of the church may err, and in fact did err, in the great Western Schism; for the kings of France, Castile, Arragon, and Scotland, acknowledged Clement the VIIth for legitimate Pope; the rest of the Christian world, adhered to Urban the VIth. But it is manifest, that one of the two parties must be wrong, which may be considered as a conclusive proof; that even within the pale of the Christian church, not only one, but several nations collectively, may err in essentials.
XXV. The second sense in which the maxim ought to be held true, is, by taking for the voice of the people, the universal concurrence of all mankind; it appearing morally impossible, that all the nations of the world should agree in adopting any one error. Thus the consent of the whole earth, in believing the existence of a God, is held by the learned, as a conclusive proof of this article.