that profession became doubly alluring to its members, because it
proffered to the priests an authority in serving the oracles which
they could not obtain in the general religion of the people. Oracles
increased then, at first slowly, and afterward rapidly, until they
grew so numerous that the single district of Boeotia contained no less
than twenty-five. The oracle of Dodona long, however, maintained its
pre-eminence over the rest, and was only at last eclipsed by that of
Delphi [52], where strong and intoxicating exhalations from a
neighbouring stream were supposed to confer prophetic phrensy.
Experience augmented the sagacity of the oracles, and the priests, no
doubt, intimately acquainted with all the affairs of the states
around, and viewing the living contests of action with the coolness of
spectators, were often enabled to give shrewd and sensible
admonitions,--so that the forethought of wisdom passed for the
prescience of divinity. Hence the greater part of their predictions
were eminently successful; and when the reverse occurred, the fault
was laid on the blind misconstruction of the human applicant. Thus no
great design was executed, no city founded, no colony planted, no war
undertaken, without the advice of an oracle. In the famine, the
pestilence, and the battle, the divine voice was the assuager of
terror and the inspirer of hope. All the instincts of our frailer
nature, ever yearning for some support that is not of the world, were
enlisted in behalf of a superstition which proffered solutions to
doubt, and remedies to distress.

Besides this general cause for the influence of oracles, there was
another cause calculated to give to the oracles of Greece a marked and
popular pre-eminence over those in Egypt. A country divided into
several small, free, and warlike states, would be more frequently in
want of the divine advice, than one united under a single monarchy, or