wickedness, being in subjection to divers sins and ruined in
strange delusions, and wandering apart into many branches of
error.

"Some deemed that everything moved by mere chance, and taught
that there was no Providence, since there was no master to
govern. Others brought in fate, and committed everything to the
stars at birth. Others worshipped many evil deities subject to
many passions, to the end that they might have them to advocate
their own passions and shameful deeds, whose forms they moulded,
and whose dumb figures and senseless idols they set up, and
enclosed them in temples, and did homage to them, `serving the
creature more than the Creator.' Some worshipped the sun, moon
and stars which God fixed, for to give light to our earthly
sphere; things without soul or sense, enlightened and sustained
by the providence of God, but unable to accomplish anything of
themselves. Others again worshipped fire and water, and the
other elements, things without soul or sense; and men, possest of
soul and reason, were not ashamed to worship the like of these.
Others assigned worship to beasts, creeping and four-footed
things, proving themselves more beastly than the things that they
worshipped. Others made them images of vile and worthless men,
and named them gods, some of whom they called males, and some
females, and they themselves set them forth as adulterers,
murderers, victims of anger, jealousy, wrath, slayers of fathers,
slayers of brothers, thieves and robbers, lame and maim,
sorcerers and madmen. Others they showed dead, struck by
thunderbolts, or beating their breasts, or being mourned over, or
in enslavement to mankind, or exiled, or, for foul and shameful
unions, taking the forms of animals. Whence men, taking occasion