P R E F A C E .

Judicious minds, who have seen some samples of the work, have highly approved of it. We have not been so attached to the new conjectures that we have not also reported the others, so that everyone has the freedom of their choice.

Those who love Jewish, Greek, and Latin literature will find their fill here enough: we have not made a profusion of it, as have the Authors who seem to have written only to teach the public that they have read a lot. They load both their text and their margin with so many citations that a Reader is frightened and put off by the mere sight of them. We have tried to avoid superfluities without forgetting anything essential: above all in the account of Judaic Idolatries, which is our principal subject, we do not believe we have passed over and forgotten a single one. And this exactitude has given rise to clarifying an infinity of passages of the Old Testament. As the Jews could only imitate the Idolatries of the Phoenicians, Syrians, and Assyrians, we have found in the idols of these nations all those of the people of the Jews: And the comparison that we make of the idols and false Gods of the Orientals with those of the Occident cannot but please the curious. For this is what has been tasted most in the works of our moderns.

Perhaps many people will be astonished that in such an advanced age, we have given ourselves to this kind of study, after having consecrated our pen to the edification of consciences through works of piety and devotion, and through a large number of writings to defend the truths of Religion. A mind worn out by so many labors could well have dispensed with work of the nature of this one; especially after having taken leave of the world by giving it a traitté de l'amour divin treatise on divine love. In truth, one would have much trouble saying how and why we engaged in this new career: We were thinking of nothing less, a few years ago: The great leisure into which the infirmities of a premature old age have cast us has led us there: By reworking manuscripts composed in the vigor of our age, we found enough things there to make a book. But it was material without form, and a chaos where one saw only darkness, except for the first Part, which one had had the time to review, and which one had given oneself the leisure to put into final form: The rest was in such a bad state that a broken man, having neither the sight to read nor the head to focus, could not apparently take the path of giving this work a reasonable form that could satisfy the taste of a century as delicate and enlightened as ours. Nevertheless, it has been undertaken, and one has...