Page:Four Dissertations - David Hume (1757).djvu/94

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DISSERTATION I.

thus all mankind stand staring at one another; and there is no beating it out of their heads, that the turban of the African is not just as good or as bad a fashion as the cowl of the European. He is a very honest man, said the prince of Sallee, speaking of de Ruyter, It is a pity he were a Christian.

How can you worship leeks and onions, we shall suppose a Sorbonnist to say to a priest of Sais? If we worship them, replies the latter; at least, we do not, at the same time, eat them. But what strange objects of adoration are cats and monkies, says the learned doctor? They are at least as good as the relicts or rotten bones of martyrs, answers his no less learned antagonist. Are you not mad, insists the Catholic, to cut one another's throat about the preference of a cabbage or a cucumber. Yes, says the pagan; I allow it, if you will confess, that all those are still madder, who fight about the preference among volumes of sophistry, ten thousand of which are not equal in value to one cabbage or cucumber[1].

  1. It is strange that the Egyptian religion, tho' so absurd, should yet have borne so great a resemblance to the Jewish, that antient writers even of the greatest genius were not able to

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