passions as himself or at least that it was governed by secret agents,
who acted after his own manner, who obliged it to execute their will,
that was sometimes favourable, sometimes inimical to the human species.
It was to these supposed agents, with whom in the sunshine of his
prosperity he was but little occupied, that in the bosom of his calamity
he addressed his prayers; he thanked them, however, for their favours,
fearing lest their ingratitude might farther provoke their fury: thus
when assailed by disaster, when afflicted with disease, he invoked them
with fervor: he required them to change in his favor the mode of acting
which was the very essence of beings; he was willing that to make the
slightest evil he experienced cease, that the eternal chain of things
might be broken; and the unerring, undeviating course of nature might he
arrested.

It was upon such ridiculous pretensions, that were founded those
supplications, those fervent prayers, which mortals, almost always
discontented with their fate, never in accord in their respective
desires, addressed to their gods. They were unceasingly upon their knees
before the altars, were ever prostrate before the power of the beings,
whom they judged had the right of commanding nature; who they supposed
to have sufficient energy to divert her course; who they considered to
possess the means to make her subservient to their particular views;
thus each hoped by presents, by humiliation, to induce them to oblige
this nature, to satisfy the discordant desires of their race. The sick
man, expiring in his bed, asks that the humours accumulated in his body
should in an instant lose those properties which renders them injurious
to his existence; that by an act of their puissance, his gods should
renew or recreate the springs of a machine worn out by infirmities. The
cultivator of a low swampy country, makes complaint of the abundance of
rain with which his fields are inundated; whilst the inhabitant of the