it will not occur to a legislator's mind to institute in Norway sacred
mysteries which cannot be performed without wine.

It will be expressly ordered to burn incense in the parvis of a temple
where beasts are slaughtered in the Deity's honour, and for the priests'
supper. This butcher's shop called "temple" would be a place of
abominable infection if it were not continually purified: and without
the assistance of aromatics, the religion of the ancients would have
caused the plague. Even the interior of the temple was decked with
festoons of flowers in order to make the air sweeter.

No cow will be sacrificed in the burning land of the Indian peninsula;
because this animal which furnishes necessary milk is very rare in an
arid country, its flesh is dry, tough, contains very little nourishment,
and the Brahmins would live very badly. On the contrary, the cow will
become sacred, in view of its rarity and utility.

One will only enter barefoot the temple of Jupiter Ammon where the heat
is excessive: one must be well shod to perform one's devotions in
Copenhagen.

It is not so with dogma. People have believed in polytheism in all
climates; and it is as easy for a Crimean Tartar as for an inhabitant of
Mecca to recognize a single God, incommunicable, non-begetting,
non-begotten. It is through its dogma still more than through its rites
that a religion is spread from one climate to another. The dogma of the
unity of God soon passed from Medina to the Caucasus; then the climate
cedes to opinion.

The Arabs said to the Turks: "We had ourselves circumcised in Arabia