In Hannah Adams’s scheme this is the thesis entry. It names the religion held by the patriarchs before the dispersion at Babel, when, on the ancient-theology account, a single revelation was still common to all mankind. The archive tracks the fortunes of exactly this claim: that one original truth was given, and then scattered.
Adams is careful to say it was not natural religion only. Alongside the light of reason she places explicit divine revelation, given through Enoch and Noah, through angels, and through the Son of God himself, which is why her entry turns the reader to the article on the pre-existents. That double footing, reason plus a primeval revelation, is the baseline every later figure in the archive is measured against.
The thesis also works at the level of a single nation. Under Chinese, Adams reports that the religion of that great and ancient people was certainly patriarchal, supposed to be derived from Joktan the brother of Peleg in Genesis 10, and since degenerated into paganism, refined among the literati into a philosophical atheism but gross idolatry among the vulgar. One patriarchal source, carried east through the Table of Nations and decaying into the idolatry the archive tracks everywhere else, is the whole pattern in miniature.
In Hannah Adams
In Adams’s own words, from the 1817 Dictionary. Each passage is quoted verbatim under its own entry.
PATRIARCHAL RELIGION, (The) was natural religion in its first and purest state after the fall: but it was not natural religion only; since we know that to the ancient patriarchs were made many divine revelations by the prophets, as Enoch and Noah; by angels, as in the case of Sodom; and by the Son of God himself. See Pre-existents. The patriarchs were the heads of numerous families, among whom they reigned as princes, and officiated as priests. See Acts ii. 29 ; vii. 8, 9. Heb. vii. 4. The same term in Ecclesiastical History is applied to Primates or Archbishops.
Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, 4th ed. (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1817), entry “Patriarchal Religion” (p. 214).