To affirm therefore, that they were all Cheats, a Man must encounter with Antiquity, and set his private Judgment up against an establish'd Opinion; but 'tis no matter for that; if I do not see any thing in that receiv'd Opinion capable of Evidence, much less of Demonstration, I must be allow'd still to think as I do; others may believe as they list; I see nothing hard or difficult in the Thing; the Priests, who were always historically inform'd of the Circumstances of the Enquirer, or at least something about them, might easily find some ambiguous Speech to make, and put some double _Entendre_ upon them, which upon the Event solv'd the Credit of the Oracle, were it one way or other; and this they certainly did, or we have room to think the DEVIL knows less of Things now than he did in former Days.
It is true that by these Delusions the Priests got infinite Sums of Money, and this makes it still probable that they would labour hard, and use the utmost of their Skill to uphold the Credit of their Oracles; and 'tis a full Discovery, as well of the Subtlety of the Sacrists, as of the Ignorance and Stupidity of the People, in those early Days of _Satan_'s Witchcraft; to see what merry Work the _Devil_ made with the World, and what gross Things he put upon Mankind: Such was the Story of the _Dordonian_ Oracle in _Epirus_, _viz_. That two _Pigeons_ flew out of _Thebes_ (_N. B._ it was the _Egyptian Thebes_) from the Temple of _Belus_, erected there by the antient Sacrists, and that one of these fled Eastward into _Lybia_, and the Desarts of _Africk_, and the other into _Greece_, namely, to _Dordona_, and these communicated the divine Mysteries to one another, and afterwards gave mystical Solutions to the devout Enquirers; first the _Dordonian_ Pigeon perching upon an Oak spoke audibly to the People there, that the Gods commanded them to build an Oracle, or Temple, to _Jupiter_, in that Place; which was accordingly done: The other Pigeon did the like on the Hill in _Africa_, where it commanded them to build another to _Jupiter Ammon_, or _Hammon_.
Wise _Cicero_ contemned all this, and, as Authors tell us, ridiculed the Answer, which, as I have hinted above, the Oracle gave to _Croesus_ proving that the Oracle it self was a _Liar_, that it could not come from _Apollo_, for that _Apollo_ never spoke _Latin_: In a Word, _Cicero_ rejected them all, and _Demosthenes_ also mentions the Cheats of the _Oracles_; when speaking of the Oracle of _Apollo_, he said, _Pithia Philippiz'd_; that is, that when the Priests were brib'd with Money, they always gave their Answers in favour of _Philip_ of _Macedon_.