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serable) there shall be laws enacted against religion, piety, and 

 divine worship ; they shall be prohibited, and punishments shall 

 be inflicted on their votaries. Then this most holy land, the seat 

 of places consecrated to divinity, and of temples, shall be full 

 of sepulchres and dead bodies. Egypt, Egypt, fables alone 

 shall remain of thy religion, and these such as will be incredible 

 to posterity ; and words alone shall be left engraved in stones, 

 narrating thy pious deeds. The Scythian also, or Indian, or 

 some other similar nation, shall inhabit Egypt. For divinity 

 shall return to heaven, all its inhabitants shall die, and thus 

 Egypt, bereft both of God and man, shall be deserted. I 

 call on thee, O most holy river, and predict to thee future 

 events. Thou shalt burst forth with a torrent of blood, full 

 even to thy banks, and thy divine waters shall not only be 

 polluted with blood, but the land shall be inundated with it, 

 and the number of the dead shall exceed that of the living. 

 He, likewise, who survives, shall only, by his language, be 

 known to be an Egyptian, but by his deeds he will appear 

 to be a stranger. Why do you weep, O Asclepius ? Egypt 

 shall experience more ample and much worse evils than 

 these, though she was once holy, and the greatest lover of 

 the Gods on the earth, by the desert of her religion. And 

 she who was alone the reductor of sanctity and the mistress 

 of piety will be an example of the greatest cruelty. Then 

 also, through the weariness of men, the world will not ap- 

 pear to be an admirable and adorable thing. This whole 

 good, a better than which, as an object of perception, there 

 neither is, nor was, nor will be, will be in danger ? and will be 

 grievous to men. Hence this whole world will be despised, 

 and will not be beloved, though it is the immutable work of 

 God, a glorious fabric, a good compounded with a multi- 

 form variety of images, a machine of the will of God, who, 

 in his work, gave his suffrage without envy, that all things 



