the free exercise of religious worship, unfettered by the degrading interference which is now claimed by the French government; and they are admitted to the equal participation of every civil right, which is essential to the acquisition, or the secure enjoyment, of property. The restraint occasioned by their not eating any thing cooked but in their own way, is a cause of restriction inherent in their religion, and must attend them wherever they sojourn among strangers: and the restriction, ab extra, which still exists, to prevent their becoming freemen, and keeping open shop, is confined to London, and a few other towns in England.

Their religion keeps them from taking the test oaths, and consequently from public offices, on that account only; and there are some obsolete laws still unrepealed respecting lands, hereditaments, &c.; but these, later custom has abrogated. It is no doubt fortunate for them, that at the period of the Reformation, and some time after, no Jews were to be found in England; as it is probable that it was from this circumstance that they escaped being included in the penal laws then enacted against those who still adhered to the church of Rome.

OF

PAGANISM AND PAGANS.

NAMES.-During the Jewish economy, and for the first three centuries after Christ, such ancient nations as were "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise," were styled Gentiles or Heathens; the former word derived from the Latin gentes, and the latter from the Greek E6, respectively signifying nations; but ever since the conversion of Constantine, those of the Roman empire who opposed the religion of Christ, and all idolaters to the present day, have been more generally distinguished by the name of Pagans. As the Greeks and Romans looked upon all nations, except their own,

* Or, according to others, since the reign of Theodosius the Younger, when the appellation of Pagans was given to the inhabitants of the country towns of Italy,― " Pagorum incola Pagani," who retained their ancient religion.

*

as barbarians, so the Jews called all who were not of their own nation Heathens, or Gentiles; and, from the giving of the law, till the propagation of the gospel, the Jews and Gentiles divided the world between them.

RISE, PROGRESS, AND HISTORY.-The Old Testament is the only authentic record of the antediluvian world; and it does not warrant us to say, that idolatry was one of those enormities which determined the great Creator to involve, in one common destruction, almost the whole race of mankind. The general corruption which then filled the world with lust and violence, seems to have arisen, chiefly, from an open defiance of the justice and power of God; and the same specific enormities, which were chiefly practical and moral, continued to operate afterwards, together with the depravation of the great principle of the Divine Unity. Soon after the flood, appeared a portentous idolatry, which gradually overspread the whole earth. Amidst the crowd of imaginary deities, the real one soon became almost entirely forgotten; irreligion, and false religion, divided the world between them, and wickedness of every kind was authorised by both. Even Abraham was most probably, before his call, an idolater:-Such, at least, were

* This insolent appellation, or custom, is to be found among the Indians to this day, who denominate all foreigners Milechihas, or infidels.-See Asiatic Researches, Vol. II. 201.

some of his ancestors;* and his father is supposed to have been, by profession, a maker of idols:but in him the knowledge of the true God, which had been well nigh lost, was recovered, and with his family and posterity alone preserved for many ages in the world.

The first monument of idolatry seems to have been that stupendous tower, which the united labours of mankind erected in honour of Belus, or the Sun, on the plains of Shinar, about the year A. C. 2247. Chaldea was the original theatre of the most ancient species of idolatry, the worship of the heavenly bodies: a delusion which may be accounted for, in some measure, from their climate, and the serenity of their sky, together with their occupation as shepherds, which kept them abroad, in a wide extent of champaign country, by night as well as by day. It may be granted, with Maimonides and Diodorus, that it was not to the planets themselves, but to the spirit which was thought to reside in them, to be the soul of them, and to direct their course through the expanse of heaven, that the Chaldeans, at first, addressed their prayers; but it cannot be asserted, with these authors, that the Sabean idolaters had invariably, for the ultimate object of their addresses to the planetary angels, the Supreme Creator: No, they gradually forgot the Deity, invisible and inaccessible, in the dazzling splendour of the orb itself, and in the imagined influences dispensed by the flaming

* Josh. xxiv. 2.