From his quirky reading of the Bible, Pliny, and Tacitus, Stukeley had deduced that the Druids must be direct descendants of the Biblical Abraham, who had hitched a ride to England on Phoenician ships. Although his book contained an account of the superb fieldwork at Stonehenge, Stukeley’s polemical intent was best summed up in the frontispiece, a portrait of the author as Chyndonax, a prince of the Druids. It was "a chronological history of the origin and progress of true religion, and of idolatry." Stukeley painted a vision of noble sages practicing a pure natural religion, the modern equivalent of which, he was at pains to point out, was none other than his own beloved Church of England! The Druids had built Stonehenge as a temple to their serpent god. Although Stukeley believed that the rites practiced there may have included human sacrifice, he was inclined to forgive his spiritual forebears their excesses. Perhaps they had got Abraham’s example wrong.