How happens it, in the midst of so many gods and different théogonies and particular worships, that there was never any religious war among the people called idolaters? This peace was a good produced from an evil, even from error; for each nation, acknowledging several inferior gods, found it good for his neighbors also to have theirs. If you except Cambyses, who is reproached with having killed the ox Apis, you will not see any conqueror in profane history who ill-treated the gods of a vanquished people. The heathens had no exclusive religion, and the priests thought only of multiplying the offerings and sacrifices.
The first offerings were fruits. Soon after, animals were required for the table of the priests; they killed them themselves, and became cruel butchers; finally, they introduced the horrible custom of sacrificing human victims, and above all, children and young girls. The Chinese, Parsees, and Indians, were never guilty of these abominations; but at Hieropolis, in Egypt, according to Porphyrius, they immolated men.
Strangers were sacrificed at Taurida: happily, the priests of Taurida had not much practice. The first Greeks, the Cypriots, Phœnicians, Tyrians, and Carthaginians, possessed this abominable superstition. The Romans themselves fell into this religious crime; and Plutarch relates, that they immolated two Greeks and two Gauls to expiate the gallantries of three vestals. Procopius, contemporary with the king of the Franks, Theodobert, says that the Franks sacrificed men when they entered Italy with that prince. The Gauls and Germans commonly made these frightful sacrifices. We can scarcely read history without conceiving horror at mankind.
It is true that among the Jews, Jeptha sacrificed his daughter, and Saul was ready to immolate his son; it is also true that those who were devoted to the Lord by anathema could not be redeemed, as other beasts were, but were doomed to perish.
We will now speak of the human victims sacrificed in all religions.
To console mankind for the horrible picture of these pious sacrifices, it is important to know, that amongst almost all nations called idolatrous, there have been holy theologies and popular error, secret worship and public ceremonies; the religion of sages, and that of the vulgar. To know that one God alone was taught to those initiated into the mysteries, it is only necessary to look at the hymn attributed to the ancient Orpheus, which was sung in the mysteries of the Eleusinian Ceres, so celebrated in Europe and Asia: "Contemplate divine nature; illuminate thy mind; govern thy heart; walk in the path of justice, that the God of heaven and earth may be always present to thy eyes: He only self-exists, all beings derive their existence from Him; He sustains them all; He has never been seen by mortals, and He sees all things."
We may also read the passage of the philosopher Maximus, whom we have already quoted: "What man is so gross and stupid as to doubt that there is a supreme, eternal, and infinite God, who has engendered nothing like Himself, and who is the common father of all things?"
There are a thousand proofs that the ancient sages not only abhorred idolatry, but polytheism.
Epictetus, that model of resignation and patience, that man so great in a humble condition, never speaks of but one God. Read over these maxims: "God has created me; God is within me; I carry Him everywhere. Can I defile Him by obscene thoughts, unjust actions, or infamous desires? My duty is to thank God for all, to praise Him for all; and only to cease blessing Him in ceasing to live." All the ideas of Epictetus turn on this principle. Is this an idolater?
Marcus Aurelius, perhaps as great on the throne of the Roman Empire as Epictetus was in slavery, often speaks, indeed, of the gods, either to conform himself to the received language, or to express intermediate beings between the Supreme Being and men; but in how many places does he show that he recognizes one eternal, infinite God alone? "Our soul," says he, "is an emanation from the divinity. My children, my body, my mind, are derived from God."