Hor. But is not every man of sense capable of knowing this from his reason?
Cleo. Yes, when the art of reasoning consequentially is come to that perfection, which it has been arrived at these several hundred years, and himself has been led into the method of thinking justly. Every common sailor could steer a course through the midst of the ocean, as soon as the use of the loadstone, and the mariners compass were invented. But before that, the most expert navigator would have trembled at the thoughts of such an enterprise. When Moses acquainted, and imbued the posterity of Jacob with this sublime and important truth, they were degenerated into slaves, attached to the superstition of the country they dwelled in; and the Egyptians, their masters, though they were great proficients in many arts and sciences, and more deeply skilled in the mysteries of nature than any other nation then was, had the most abject and abominable notions of the Deity, which it is possible to conceive; and no savages could have exceeded their ignorance and stupidity, as to the Supreme Being, the invisible cause that governs the world. He taught the Israelites à priori; and their children, before they were nine or ten years old, knew what the greatest philosophers did not attain to, by the light of nature, till many ages after.
Hor. The advocates for the ancients will never allow, that any modern philosophers have either thought or reasoned better, than men did in former ages.
Cleo. Let them believe their eyes: What you say every man of sense may know, by his own reason, was in the beginning of Christianity contested, and denied with zeal and vehemence by the greatest men in Rome. Celsus, Symmachus, Porphyry, Hierocles, and other famous rhetoricians, and men of unquestionable good sense, wrote in defence of idolatry, and strenuously maintained the plurality and multiplicity of their gods. Moses lived about fifteen hundred years before the reign of Augustus. If in a place where I was very well assured that nobody understood any thing of colouring or drawing, a man should tell me, that he had acquired the art of painting by inspiration, I should be more ready to laugh at him than to believe him; but if I saw him draw several fine portraits before my face, my unbelief would cease, and I should think it ridiculous any longer to suspect his veracity. All the accounts that other lawgivers and founders of nations have given of the deities, which they or their predecessors conversed with, contained ideas that were unworthy of the Divine Being; and by the light of nature only, it is easily proved, that they must have been false: But the image which Moses gave the Jews of the Supreme Being, that He was One, and had made heaven and earth, will stand all tests, and is a truth that will outlast the world. Thus, I think, I have fully proved, on the one hand, that all true religion must be revealed, and could not have come into the world without miracle; and, on the other, that what all men are born with towards religion, before they receive any instruction, is fear.
Hor. You have convinced me many ways, that we are poor creatures by nature; but I cannot help struggling against those mortifying truths, when I hear them started first. I long to hear the origin of society, and I continually retard your account of it myself with new questions.
Cleo. Do you remember where we left off?
Hor. I do not think we have made any progress yet; for we have nothing towards it but a wild man, and a wild woman, with some children and grandchildren, which they are not able either to teach or govern.
Cleo. I thought that the introduction of the reverence, which the wildest son must feel, more or less, for the most savage father, if he stays with him, had been a considerable step.
Hor. I thought so too, till you destroyed the hopes I had conceived of it yourself, by showing me the incapacity of savage parents to make use of it: And since we are still as far from the origin of society as ever we were, or ever can be, in my opinion, I desire, that before you proceed to that main point, you would answer what you have put off once already, which is my question concerning the notions of right and wrong: I cannot be easy before I have your sentiments on this head.