Had I a power as my will is good,.The atheist believes there are no Gods; the superstitious would have none, but is a believer against his will, and would be an infidel if he durst. He would be as glad to ease himself of the burthen of his fear, as Tantalus would be to slip his head from under the great stone that hangs over him, and would bless the condition of the atheist as [p. 182] absolute freedom, compared with his own. The atheist now has nothing to do with superstition; while the superstitious is an atheist in his heart, but is too much a coward to think as he is inclined.
Know this, bold tyrant, I would have thy blood.
1
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Is it a sin then to speak amiss of the Gods, and is
it not to think amiss of them? And is not thinking the
cause of speaking ill? For the only reason of our dislike
to detraction is that we look upon it as a token of ill-will
to us; and we therefore take those for our enemies that
misrepresent us, because we look upon them as untrusty.
and disaffected. You see then what the superstitious
think of the divinity, while they fancy the Gods such
heady, faithless, fickle, revengeful, cruel, and fretful things.
The consequence of which is that the superstitious person
must needs both fear and hate them at once. And indeed,
how can he otherwise choose, while he thinks the greatest
calamities he either doth now or must hereafter undergo
are wholly owing to them? Now he that both hates and
fears the Gods must of necessity be their enemy. And if
he trembles, fears, prostrates, sacrifices, and sits perpetually
in their temples, that is no marvel at all. For the very
worst of tyrants are complimented and attended, yea, have
statues of gold erected to them, by those who in private
hate them and wag their heads. Hermolaus waited on
Alexander, and Pausanias was of Philip's guard, and so
was Chaerea of Caligula's; yet every one of these said, I
warrant you, in his heart as he went along,—
1 Il. XXII. 20.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.