nations, not contented with the national gods, made each to himself one
or more gods, which he supposed presided exclusively over his own
household, from whom he supposed he derived his own peculiar happiness,
to whom he attributed all his domestic misfortunes. The idea of these
powerful agents, these supposed distributors of good and evil, was
always associated with that of terror; their name was never pronounced
without recalling to man's wind either his own particular calamities or
those of his fathers. In many places man trembles at this day, because
his progenitors have trembled for thousands of years past. The thought
of his gods always awakened in man the most afflicting ideas. If he
recurred to the source of his actual fears, to the commencement of those
melancholy impressions that stamp themselves in his mind when their name
is announced, he would find it in the conflagrations, in the
revolutions, in those extended disasters, that have at various times
destroyed large portions of the human race; that overwhelmed with dismay
those miserable beings who escaped the destruction of the earth; these
in transmitting to posterity, the tradition of such afflicting events,
have also transmitted to him their fears; have delivered down to their
successors, those gloomy ideas which their bewildered imaginations,
coupled with their barbarous ignorance of natural causes, had formed to
them of the anger of their irritated gods, to which their alarm falsely
attributed these sweeping disasters.

If the gods of nations had their birth in the bosom of alarm, it was
again in that of despair that each individual formed the unknown power
that he made exclusively for himself. Ignorant of physical causes,
unpractised in their mode of action, unaccustomed to their effects,
whenever he experienced any serious misfortune, whenever he was
afflicted with any grievous sensation, he was at a loss how to account
for it; he therefore attributed it to his household gods, to whom he