him to impute the same sentiments to those awful beings, whose presence he could not avoid, and whose power he could not re|sist. These natural hopes and fears, and suspicions, were propagated by sympathy, and confirmed by education; and the Gods were universally represented and believed to be the rewarders of humanity and mer|cy, and the avengers of perfidy and in|justice. And thus religion, even in its rudest form, gave a sanction to the rules of morality, long before the age of artifi|cial reasoning and philosophy. That the terrors of religion should thus enforce the natural sense of duty, was of too much importance to the happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and uncertainty of philosophical researches.
These researches, however, when they came to take place, confirmed those ori|ginal anticipations of nature. Upon what|ever we suppose that our moral faculties are founded, whether upon a certain mo|dification of reason, upon an original in|stinct, called a moral sense, or upon some other principle of our nature, it cannot
