Only the briefest details are' given.
Perceiving further, that in order to understand these relations I should sometimes have to consider them one by one, and sometimes only to bear them in mind or embrace them in the aggregate, I thought that, in order the better to consider them individually, I should view them as subsisting between straight lines, than which I could find no objects more simple, or capable of being more distinctly represented to my imagination and senses; and on the other hand that, in order to retain them in the memory or embrace an aggregate of many, I should express them by certain characters, the briefest possible."
For other areas we have often no description of the procedure at all, but merely the briefest outline of the actual process of slaughter, and we are ignorant whether the form of the rite is in reality simple (either from a loss of primitive elements or from never having advanced beyond the stage at which we find it), or whether the absence of detail is due to the inattention or lack of interest of the observer.
It is only possible here to refer in briefest enumeration to the material and external objects and forms of popular Hebrew religion.
Its briefest equivalent may be given as "persecuting and privileged orthodoxy" in general, and, more particularly, it is the particular system which Voltaire saw around him, of which he had felt the effects in his own exiles and the confiscations of his books, and of which he saw the still worse effects in the hideous sufferings of Calas and La Barre.