2. Chapter VIII

2. Chapter VIII

Chapter VIII O n traditions: their origin, use, and corruption — The attempt and success of the poets in corrupting natural theology — The dreadful ruin of the human race through ignorance of the true God — Κρόνος

[Kronos], Χρόνος [Chronos], and Noah — The origin of Ἀνθρωποθυσίας [of human sacrifice] — On lawgivers — The πολιτική [civil] theology —

Philosophers — The φυσική [natural] theology — On superstition — The contempt of all religions among the wise — The total destruction of the Gentiles' theology.

I. I have set out in what manner philosophy played its part in corrupting natural theology, or rather was itself corrupted. There were also other causes of the total ἀποστασίας [apostasy] from all true knowledge of God.

It has seemed worthwhile to narrate them briefly here, though they properly pertain to the corruption of religious worship — of which more is to be said in the investigation of the origin of idolatry. And here the human race defected deliberately from natural theology. For whatever help God indulged to sinners for obtaining the knowledge of himself, of the right and

the true, all of it, the blindness of the human heart twisted to its own destruction.

II. It is established that the knowledge which the most ancient mortals had of God was augmented and increased by traditions of those revelations which some had received from God through their parents. For since the age which ended in the flood was one during whose first half the common parent and teacher of all was present, no one can doubt that from Noah and his sons no small familiarity with divine things, and knowledge of God, flowed down to their grandchildren and those born from them. How far the efficacy of that knowledge extended while the traditions flowed uncontaminated from their source is not the place here to inquire.

III. It is certain that knowledge of many things pertaining to religion flowed into the human race from ancient times through traditions. But that the knowledge of ancient things pertaining to sacred matters was exceedingly obscure and uncertain among the nations, the wise men themselves have confessed. So Virgil:

"Unfold now, O goddesses of Helicon, and begin the song.

For ye remember, O divine ones, and ye have power to recall; To us scarcely the thin breath of report glides across."

— Aeneid, Bk. VII, 641, 645, 646.

IV. Yet we shall see that they had some. Whether all those things excellently said among the ancient philosophers about divine matters were entirely drawn from the writings of the Jews, I for my part greatly doubt, as Scaliger did. Eusebius indeed contends that all knowledge of divine things among the Greeks flowed from the Hebrews. Julius Scaliger writes in his

Exercitations, lxi, that Plato also scraped together many things from Phoenician theology which he himself did not understand — correctly or

not I do not know. That they retained certain things by the force of catholic tradition — things whose fame had invaded the world from the very first beginnings of things — cannot be unknown to anyone who has so much as greeted their writings at the threshold. Let us briefly review a few by way of specimen. Very many acknowledged the creator of all things, without adducing any reasons to confirm this as credible.

Ἦν ποτέ τοι χρόνος οὗτος ἐν ᾧ ἅμα πάντ' ἐπεφύκει [There was once a time when all things grew together at once]

— ascribed to Linus, the most ancient composer of poems among the Greeks. The same origin of things is celebrated by all the poets without exception. What Ovid wrote at the beginning of his work, boys know.

Horace concurs, Satires, III, Bk. I, 99-104:

"When animals first crept forth upon the primal earth, A mute and ugly herd, they fought for acorns and their lairs

With nails and fists, then clubs, and so in time With weapons which their use had fashioned;

Until they found the words by which to mark Their voices and their meanings and their names."

(With which Diodorus Siculus, History, Bk. I, has genuine parallels), describing in his own manner the origin of the human race. And Juvenal,

Satire VI, 11-13:

"For then, when the world was new and heaven still young, Men lived who were born from broken oak,

Or fashioned from the clay, and had no parents."

And his σύγχρονος [contemporary] Papinius, Thebaid, Bk. IV, 275-281:

"Arcadians of old, older than stars and moon, Ye give your faithful bands; fame says ye were sprung

From the stiff stock of the groves, when earth first marvelled To bear the first footprints; not yet were fields or homes or cities,

Nor limit set to marriage. Oaks and laurels Bore crude births, and shadowy ash created peoples,

And the green boy dropped from the teeming mountain-ash."

V. Concerning the Brahmins, Strabo, Geography, Bk. XV: Περὶ πολλῶν δὲ τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ὁμοδοξεῖν· ὅτι γὰρ γενητὸς ὁ κόσμος, καὶ φθαρτός, λέγειν κἀκείνους· ὅτι διοικῶν αὐτὸν, καὶ ποιῶν θεὸς δι' ὅλου διαπεφοίτηκεν αὐτοῦ — "That they agree with the Greeks on many things, as that the world had a beginning and will perish, and that God, its maker and governor, pervades the whole of it." That author is the authority that both

Greeks and barbarians agree in this — that the world was created by God — from the most ancient tradition. Aristotle doubts, Topics 19, On the Heavens I, 10 — but almost alone. That Hesiod, Orpheus, Apollonius,

Aristophanes, Pliny, Diodorus Siculus, Numenius, Anaxagoras, and Megasthenes gave credence to the same tradition would be easy to show.

There is no question about Plato. That Thales, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Democritus, Empedocles, Metrodorus, and Anaximander held that the world had some beginning is shown by Eusebius, Praeparatio

Evangelica, Bk. I, ch. 7. I pass over the traditions concerning particular things — Noah, the flood, Abraham — of which Philo Byblius, Lucian,

Strabo, and others make mention. Together with the creation of the world, the report of a judgment to be exercised upon men after this life obtained universal currency. The presumption of the immortality of souls also accompanied this persuasion, which, although it also rests on reason, yet since it always prevailed most of all among the common people rather than σοφούς [the wise], is to be ascribed only to tradition. Thales of Miletus

defined the soul as φύσιν ἀεὶ κίνητον ἢ αὐτοκίνητον [a nature always in motion or self-moving]. And concerning him Diogenes says: Ἔνιοι δὲ καὶ αὐτὸν πρῶτον εἰπεῖν ἀθανάτους τὰς ψυχάς [Some say that he was the first to speak of the immortality of souls] — that is, he was the first to treat philosophically of the ἀθανασίᾳ [immortality] of the soul. The consensus of most attributes that honour to Pherecydes. "One," says Metrodorus, Bk., ch.

2, "of those things which the Druids teach leaks out to the common people — namely, that souls are eternal." And concerning the same people, Caesar,

Gallic War, Bk. VI, 14: "They wish above all to persuade men that souls do not perish." And Valerius, Bk. II, ch. 6, 10: "There comes to mind that ancient custom of the Gauls — who, it has been handed down by memory, were accustomed to lend money to be repaid to them in the underworld, because they were persuaded that the souls of men are immortal."

Concerning Plato, no house is better known than his own — the Phaedo is witness.

VI. The same persuasion holds even the most barbarous nations.

Throughout all America, there was scarcely anyone before the arrival of Europeans on those shores who doubted it. Some also received the report of ἀναστάσεως [resurrection]. Θεόπομπος καὶ ἀναβιώσεσθαι κατὰ τοὺς μάγους φησὶ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ ἔσεσθαι ἀθανάτους, says Diogenes

Laërtius in his preface "Theopompus also says that according to the Magi men will revive and be immortal." The great Plato agrees in the Phaedo, ch.

17: Ἀλλ' ἔστι καὶ τῷ ὄντι καὶ τὸ ἀναβιώσκεσθαι, καὶ ἐκ τῶν τεθνεώτων τοὺς ζῶντας γίγνεσθαι, καὶ τὰς τῶν τεθνεώτων ψυχὰς εἶναι· καὶ ταῖς μὲν ἀγαθαῖς ἄμεινον εἶναι, ταῖς κακαῖς κάκιον — that is, "And that men do revive, and that the living come from the dead, and that the souls of the dead survive, and that it is better for the good and worse for the wicked."

VII. And these things, as we said, they believed, expecting that some judgment would be exercised upon men according to what they had done in this mortal life, whether worthy or unworthy of right reason. Hence the same Plato, Epistle VII: Πείθεσθαι δὲ ὄντως ἀεὶ χρὴ τοῖς παλαιοῖς τε καὶ ἱεροῖς λόγοις, οἱ δὲ μηνύουσιν ἡμῖν ἀθάνατον ψυχὴν εἶναι, δικαστάς τε ἴσχειν καὶ τινῶν [τίνειν] τὰς μεγίστας τιμωρίας, ὅταν τις ἀπαλλαχθῇ τοῦ σώματος — that is, "But faith must always be given to ancient and sacred traditions, which declare that our soul is immortal and has judges by whose decrees the greatest rewards and punishments are assigned, as soon as anyone has departed from the body."

VIII. Moreover this opinion prevailed among most people so widely and was esteemed of such moment for restraining the minds of the wicked, that the wisest of the pagans, Cato himself, did not hesitate in the very senate to attribute the contrary opinion to Caesar in order to bring him into odium; for in Sallust, Catilinarian War, LII, he speaks thus: "Gaius Caesar discoursed on this matter, holding to be false, I believe, what is related about the underworld — that the wicked occupy dreadful, uncultivated, foul, and fearful places, by a different road from the good." This opinion was depicted by the most learned of the poets in Aeneid VI, imitating

Homer's Odyssey, Bk. XI — whence what the papists have drawn is well known. Even the common people were thoroughly imbued with this persuasion. Hence, what is done in the underworld was committed to painters to describe, just as is still done in those places where men adore the Roman pontiff and elsewhere. Plautus, Captivi, V, 4, 1:

"I have often seen many painted pictures of what torments happen beneath Acheron."

They supposed that men could be kept in their duty and restrained from crimes, by these things. "They believe that men are most powerfully stirred to virtue by disregard of the fear of death," Caesar says of the Gauls. And Lucan, Bk. I, 469:

"Happy in their error, upon whom presses not That greatest of fears — the dread of death; whence bold

To rush upon the sword are those brave souls, And capable of death, and basely grudging

To spare a life that will return again."

And concerning the Germans, Appian in his Celtic History: "The Germans have the most ferocious customs, outstanding courage in attack, and the greatest contempt of death, on account of the hope of reviving." The same mind prevailed among the Britons, since Caesar testifies that the discipline of the Druids arose from them. The English report that the inhabitants of New England and all Americans are persuaded that industrious, active, and temperate men, when they die, go to the southern regions of the world — where they believe the best God dwells, since they observe the winds that drive away the cold, and thus all want, blowing from there in spring-time — while all the slothful and idle go to the northern regions, which are dreadful and frightful. Seneca speaks admirably: "Then our soul will have cause to congratulate itself, when, sent forth from these shadows in which it is wallowed, it looks upon clear things not with dim sight, but admits the whole day and is given back to heaven, when it has received the place which it occupied by the lot of birth." This, he says, after his manner, splendidly, eloquently, magnificently.

IX. For the rest, since they were utterly ignorant of the one road to true happiness, although they greatly preferred the good to the wicked, they yet

established the condition of even the best in the underworld as uncertain and almost wretched — and so φόβῳ θανάτου διὰ παντὸς τοῦ ζῆν ἔνοχοι ἦσαν δουλείας [were all their lifetime subject to bondage through fear of death], as the apostle says, Heb. 2:15. Thus Achilles, though reigning widely over the dead, laments his condition before Ulysses:

Μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα φαίδιμ' Ὀδυσσεῦ· Βουλοίμην κ' ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ

Ἀνδρὶ παρ' ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη, Ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.

[Speak not to me of death, renowned Ulysses; I would rather be a serf above ground, serving another man, one with no portion and scant livelihood, than reign over all the dead who have perished.]

— Homer, Odyssey, Bk. XI, 487-490.

X. Now all these things — some, many, very many — are established to have flowed into the whole human race from the most ancient tradition. I know indeed that among the wise very many are found to whom all things concerning the future judgment and the diverse — that is, eternal — fate of men were a matter of ridicule; and not only Lucretius the Epicurean cries out:

"And that fear of Acheron is to be driven headlong forth, Which from its depths troubles all human life."

— Bk. III, 37, 38.

XI. But Cicero himself derides these things: "Tell me, pray," he says, "do those things frighten you — the three-headed Cerberus in the underworld, the roaring of Cocytus, the crossing of Acheron, Tantalus dying of thirst, his chin just touching the topmost water? Is it not that which

"Sisyphus, sweating with his effort, rolls the stone — and makes no progress at all."

And perhaps the inexorable judges Minos and Rhadamanthus, before whom neither Lucius Crassus could defend you, nor Marcus Antonius, nor — since the case would be conducted before Greek judges — could you engage Demosthenes: you yourself would have to plead your own case before the greatest assembly. Perhaps you fear these things, and therefore think death an everlasting evil. A: Do you think me so delirious as to believe such things are real? M: You do not believe them? A: Not at all. M:

That is a pity, by Hercules. A: Why, pray? M: Because I could have been eloquent in arguing against them." — Tusculan Disputations, Bk. I, ch. 5. If indeed he had only attacked the most vain fictions of the poets, he would have acted according to the norm of right reason; but as is plainly evident from the ensuing disputation, he set himself against the whole tradition, and therefore against the truth of the matter itself. And in the mind of others,

Seneca in the Troades, Act I:

"After death, there is nothing, and death itself is nothing.

The final boundary of a swift course.

You ask in what place you will lie after death:

Where those unborn lie.

And Greedy time and Chaos devour us.

Death is indivisible, harmful to the body And not sparing the soul."

XII. But let us grant that Cicero wished to discourse plausibly on both sides, settling nothing; and that Seneca wrote whatever he pleased in the manner of a poet. But Pliny not only rejects that common persuasion, but attempts to refute it with arguments, Bk. VII, ch. 56: "For all," he says,

"from the last day, the same things exist as before the first; nor after death is there any more sensation for body or soul than there was before birth. For the same vanity propagates itself even into the future, and in the very times of death itself fabricates for itself a life, sometimes granting immortality to the soul, sometimes transformation, sometimes sensation to the shades below, and the worship of ghosts, and making a god of one who has already ceased even to be a man. Or truly, does the principle of breathing in any way distinguish man from the rest of the animals? And are not many things found in life of far greater duration, to which no one divines a similar immortality? But what body does the soul have of itself? What is its matter?

Where is thought in it? How does it see, hear, or what does it do? What is its use without these things? What then is the abode, and how great is the multitude of souls through so many ages, as it were of shadows? These are the fabrications of childish delirium, and the inventions of a mortality that can never cease to be greedy." And whatever of this kind has been received among men, Strabo most openly calls fables, Bk. XV: Παραπλέκουσι δὲ καὶ μύθους ὥσπερ καὶ Πλάτων περί τε ἀφθαρσίας ψυχῆς, καὶ τῶν καθ' ᾅδου κρίσεων. He is speaking of the Brahmins. "They interweave," he says,

"fables also, as Plato did, about the immortality of the soul and about the judgments that take place in Hades." Without doubt, most of the wise agreed with Pliny and Strabo.

XIII. But relying on this persuasion, they mutually exhorted one another to commit every crime. Hence, the saying passed into a proverb — φάγωμεν καὶ πίωμεν· αὔριον γὰρ ἀποθνήσκομεν [let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die] — which the apostle mentions, 1 Cor. 15:32. In the poets, nothing occurs more frequently. Catullus, Poem V:

"Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,

And all the rumours of stern old men Let us value at a single farthing.

Suns can set and rise again:

But for us, once our brief light has set, One unbroken night must be slept through."

And Horace, Odes I, 4, 15:

"The brief sum of life forbids us to open Any long hope. Soon night will press on you,

And the fabled Shades, and the thin Plutonian house; Where once you arrive, you will no longer cast

The lots for the rule of wine, Nor marvel at tender Lycidas."

And Persius himself, though laughing, Satire V, 151:

"Indulge your genius; let us pluck sweet things; ours is What you live by: you will become ashes, shades, and a tale."

The Greeks come still closer to the words recalled by the apostle. Thus Strato:

Καὶ πίνε καὶ τέρπου Δημόκρατες· οὐ γὰρ ἐς αἰεὶ Πιόμεθ' οὐδ' αἰεὶ τέρψιος ἑξόμεθα.

[Drink and be merry, Democrates; for we shall not always drink, nor always have delight.] And:

[Drink and be glad; for what tomorrow or the future holds, no one knows.]

Yet from that persuasion which the common people had drawn from the most ancient tradition, the common people never suffered itself to be removed.

XIV. It would be easy to review what other fragments of divine truth other traditions also hinted at. I say the duty of all men was to use the benefit of them to advance the relics of natural light. But it is evident that those very traditions were corrupted almost in the first place; and so the very remedy of the disease — and the antidote against eternal death — was converted into a deadly poison. For we have shown that this πατροπαράδοτον

[ancestral] doctrine afforded not contemptible aids to the natural light in seeking God; but once it was itself corrupted, it gradually also corrupted that residual light and all the προλήψεις [preconceptions] of the human mind concerning God and overturned them. How this came about, we shall briefly set out.

XV. It is natural to traditions to fly abroad upon the lips of men. In that state of things which we have described, each person used them according to the extent of which he had become a partaker. Those who first dared to collect, systematise, and set out what was scattered and wandering here and there were the poets. These first approached their task by hymns and little songs set to melody to capture the ears of men; then they gave it ornamented form by writings, crammed beyond telling with fables of every kind. The foundation of the whole mass was traditions. But gradually they corrupted most thoroughly all that knowledge of God which the mortal race had drawn from ancient traditions. We speak chiefly of Hellenism; for that mode ἀποστασίας [of apostasy] eventually reached catholicity. While therefore they either twisted what they had heard into foreign and fabulous senses, or enlarged it with clever fictions, or devised other things twinned

with what they had heard, or used ingeniously contrived allegories to read into those things which they themselves had received from their forefathers by obscure report and understood not at all — they left nothing sound, solid, true, nothing that was not vain, fictitious, idolatrous, and ruinous, in the whole of natural religion.

XVI. Indeed, those men confounded everything to such a degree that to ascertain by conjecture what they received, from whom, by what report, by what tradition, on what occasions, and led by what reasonings, they embraced very many of the things they did, is altogether impossible. It is evident that they mixed traditions, interpolated with fables, natural and moral theology, and the worship of demons and of dead men. What each person drew from corrupt natural theology, what from perverse traditions, what from diabolical oracles, what from common use, what from his own brain — to investigate this accurately is utterly impossible. Indeed, very often they exhibited the same obscure divine tradition, some notable part of natural theology, the most inept fables, and Satanic worship, in the same words and under the same baggage of fictions. The Sun, Noah, Saturn — indeed Jupiter, the Planet, the Hero, Heaven, Ether, and Satan himself were one and the same thing, as we shall see more fully later.

XVII. But the human mind, labouring under native blindness, is greedy for fables and errors, and tenacious of them. After, therefore, it was imbued with δεισιδαιμονίᾳ [superstition] and polytheism, the natural light itself, unequal to removing the prejudices, utterly succumbed; nor was it ever able to extricate itself from the Lernaean swamp of fables. This confusion may perhaps be placed before the eyes by a single example. Bacchus is the same as Adonis, Evius, and Sabus — so Plutarch, Symposiaca, IV, question 5, where he most absurdly undertakes, with all care for truth and candour

abandoned, to investigate the origins of Jewish ceremonies. Sanford, in his first book On the Descent of Christ to the Underworld, almost proves that the names Iacchus and Bacchus flowed from ְיהָוה [Jehovah] — a learned conjecture, to be sure. That most excellent and most learned man, I know, has many who owe him much in the investigation of the origins of πολυθεότητος [polytheism], idolatry, and Hellenism — some who owe him everything — yet I find him rarely mentioned by anyone and praised by no one. That Adon comes from ֲא ֹדִני [Adonai], I think no one will deny; Sabus from ְצָבאֹות [Sabaoth]; and Evius appears to express ֶאְהֶיה [Ehyeh] — from which Plutarch dreams that the Levites among the Jews took their name.

But these are names or epithets of the living God. The ancients, therefore, understood through those names — which reached them, though by thin report — the true divine power. Having received them in this manner, they assigned other divine attributes to them. Among these, some were true, but others were ψευδεπίγραφα [falsely ascribed], false, and diabolical. First, they referred to Noah what they had heard of him; and the name of Bacchus seems to some to be derived from ַנֹ [Noah], or from Noachus. That Liber pilfered Noah's vines and vineyard is not to be doubted. Hence, Lactantius:

"The lie of the poets is not in the deed but in the name." See Vossius, On Idolatry, Bk. I, ch. 19 and 25. Thus, the true God and ִאיׁש ָהֲאָדָמה [the man of the ground], Gen. 9:20, have been confused. Bacchus is also perhaps ַּבר ּכּוׁש

[bar Kush] "son of Cush" — so Bochart thinks, Sacred Geography, Bk. I, ch. 2 — that is, Nimrod. Hence, he was called Ζαγρεύς [Zagreus], or "the mighty hunter," Gen. 10:9; and Νεβρώδης [Nebrodes], as all the Greeks call

Nimrod. But Sanford, Bk. I, ch. 1, sect. 18, 19, shows with very many examples that almost the whole history of Moses was ascribed to Bacchus; after him, and with the same instances, Vossius, Bk. I, ch. 30; nor does

Bochart think otherwise, Bk. I, ch. 18. Moreover, whatever is said about Bacchus is said in all respects about Osiris in Egypt, who, having been great among his people, after death received all the honours of the sun. Finally, there appeared Bacchus of Thebes, or Διόνυσος [Dionysus], so named from Mount Nysa; and some learned men suspect that Nysa is none other than

Sinai, by μετάθεσιν [transposition] of letters. That Arabia is called India by the Greeks, it would be easy to demonstrate from many testimonies. But there is also Mount Nysa in India beyond Caucasus, not far from the river

Cophen, as Philostratus shows in the Life of Apollonius, Bk. II, ch. 4 — which he narrates that men planted with vines in honour of Bacchus, who there performed marvellous deeds. And the inhabitants of that region declared that this Bacchus was Assyrian, and that the Theban Bacchus came to him. Others say that indeed the city placed at the foot of the mountain is called Nysa, but the mountain itself Meron, so Curtius, Bk. VIII, ch. 10.

Μηρός, however, is "thigh." Hence the fable about Bacchus sewn into the thigh of Jupiter — unless you suspect a Hebraism, and that "born from the thigh of Jupiter" signifies nothing other than being the Son of God, as Heinsius thinks in his Aristarchus. And these things are not unworthy of the sneers with which Lucian greets them in Dialogues, IX.

XVIII. Furthermore, Eusebius relates the birth and deeds of Dionysus of Thebes from Diodorus, Praeparatio Evangelica, Bk. XX, ch. 20. He, having perhaps been the first of Europeans to make certain excursions into the regions of Asia, in the eyes of the fabulists of the next age drained all the ancient traditions about the Bacchi mentioned above; and he alone was all that in reality no single one of them was — for upon him the μυθιστοιοί

[mythmakers] heaped together nearly all the πατροπαράδοτα [ancestral traditions]. Nor did this marvellous frustration stop here. Because the

ancients ascribed the invention of wine and of the vine to Bacchus, those who cobbled together natural theology contended that by Bacchus only wine or autumn — or that season of the year when the vines ripen — was signified. So Lucretius teaches us, Bk. II, 654-658:

"Here, if anyone resolves to call the sea Neptune, And grain Ceres, and prefers to abuse the name of Bacchus

Rather than utter the proper term for the liquid, Let us grant that he asserts the circle of the earth

To be the Mother of the Gods — yet let him not thereby Be affected by that fiction himself."

And Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, Bk. I: Ἔνιοι δὲ καὶ τὴν Διονύσου φυγὴν εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν οἰνοποιΐαν σημαίνειν φασὶ, παλαὶ ἐγνωριζομένην· ἡδὺν γὰρ εἶναι τὸν οἶνον παρεγχουμένης θαλάσσης [Some say that the flight of Dionysus to the sea signifies the making of wine, a thing known from old; for wine is sweet when seawater is mixed in with it] — that is, "The fable of Bacchus fleeing to the sea, some think signifies the making of wine, known from of old; since wine is sweeter when seawater is added." But it is too well established that the fable was taken from the history of Moses.

XIX. That these men composed these things absurdly and incompetently, Philo Byblius testifies in the preface to his history of Sanchuniathon: Ἀλλ', he says, οἱ μὲν νεώτατοι τῶν ἱερολόγων, τὰ μὲν γεγονότα πράγματα ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἀποπέμψαντες ἀλληγορίας καὶ μύθους ἐπενόησαν, καὶ, τοῖς κοσμικοῖς παθήμασι συγγένειαν πλασάμενοι μυστήρια κατέστησαν — that is, "But the more recent theologians, having dismissed from the beginning the things which were truly done, devised allegories and myths, and having fabricated a connection with worldly phenomena, established mysteries."

And indeed he, having determined that all things said about the gods were

to be referred to true histories, rejects both that whole natural theology on the one hand and the μυθικήν [mythical treatment] of the poets on the other.

But innumerable other examples of this confusion occur everywhere. The history of the origin of the world in Diodorus Siculus — especially in Sanchuniathon and Philo Byblius — shows the same thing. The first chapter of Genesis is transferred into the history of many centuries, concerning I know not what kings: Heaven, Earth, Sun, Moon, ָמֶות [Mot], who is said to be Pluto, all have a place in it. ֱא ֹלִהים [Elohim] himself is also introduced.

Amid these rough places, anyone can conjecture how easy it was for the ancient serpent to impose nefarious opinions about God, and impious worship of himself, upon the human race.

XX. Pausanias speaks admirably in his Arcadica: Ἐν τῷ παντὶ αἰῶνι πολλὰ μὲν πάλαι συμβάντα μηκέτι δὲ γινόμενα, ἄπιστα εἶναι πεποιήκασιν εἰς τοὺς, οἱ τοῖς ἀληθέσιν ἐποικοδομοῦντες ἐψευσμένα — that is, "In all ages, the credibility of many ancient events, no longer occurring, has been taken away among the common people through the fault of those who have smothered the foundations of truth by erecting fables upon them." They rendered truth itself, so corrupted and burdened with lies, incredible. How this came about, he shows a little afterward: Ὅτι ὅσοι δέ, he says, μυθολογήμασιν ἀκούοντες ἡδόνται πεφύκασι καὶ αὐτοί τι ἐπιτηδεύεσθαι καὶ οὕτω τοῖς ἀληθέσιν ἐλυμήναντο συγκεραννύντες αὐτὰ ἐψευσμένοις

[Those who by nature take pleasure in hearing tales are disposed to add something of their own, and in this way they corrupted the truth by mixing it with falsehoods]. So it came about that "those who by nature delight in hearing fictions of this kind themselves add something to them, and thus, as it were by a flood of lies, truth is corrupted and wholly loses its authority."

XXI. From the just judgment of God, therefore, delivering over to a reprobate mind those who held the truth in unrighteousness — those who did not see fit to retain God in their knowledge — being vain in their reasonings, a certain flood of spiritual abominations immediately, accompanied by all unrighteousness, violence, and impurity, settled upon the world. This came about from the cunning of Satan and the κακοζηλία

[evil emulation] of the many. For as polytheism grew strong, there was nothing so vain or so worthless that it was not enrolled in the number of the gods. No stone, no piece of wood, no virtue, no vice, nothing good, nothing evil, was without its worship. All creatures, from the grass of the field to the topmost stars of heaven, were subjected to the same ἀτιμίᾳ [dishonour].

The apostle teaches us this: Ἤλλαξαν τὴν δόξαν τοῦ ἀφθάρτου Θεοῦ ἐν ὁμοιώματι εἰκόνος φθαρτοῦ ἀνθρώπου, καὶ πετεινῶν, καὶ τετραπόδων, καὶ ἑρπετῶν [They changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things], Rom. 1:23. It is established that Paul by these words strikes at idolaters of every kind. Maddened by Hellenism, thinking the gods had aἀνθρωποφυίας [human nature], they fashioned the images of the divine power in the likeness of corruptible man. The worship of πετεινῶν, τετραπόδων, καὶ ἑρπετῶν [birds, four-footed beasts, and creeping things] had its origin among the Egyptians. Philo: Κύνας, λύκους, καὶ λέοντας, καὶ κροκοδείλους, καὶ ἄλλα πλείονα θηρία, καὶ ἔνυδρα, καὶ πτηνὰ θεοπλαστοῦντες — "Dogs, wolves, lions, crocodiles, and very many other things — aquatic, terrestrial, and winged — they fashion and adore in the place of gods." And Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus, Bk. I: Τό μοι λοιπὸν καταλέγειν τὸ πλῆθος ὧν σέβονται ζώων Αἰγύπτιοι ἑρπετῶν τε καὶ πτηνῶν καὶ θηρίων καὶ ἐνύδρων νηκτῶν [It remains for me to enumerate

the multitude of animals the Egyptians worship — creeping things, birds, beasts, and swimming creatures of the water]. Indeed, God willed that the greatest example of Satanic dominion and tyranny should appear in those who are thought to have been the first to defect from the true God. Of their σεβάσματα [objects of worship], therefore, it is permissible to take a passing contemplation, as Paul did at Athens — especially since Egyptian superstition by no means contained itself within the borders of Egypt.

"We received into our Roman temples your Isis, and your half-divine dogs," says Lucan, Bk. VIII, 831.

XXII. I know not what mysteries Athanasius Kircher recently attempted to elicit from their sacred rites, labouring with great effort and expense — but without result, not to say ridiculously — to teach that those alone were wise whom the rest of the world had believed destitute of wisdom beyond what is human folly. He saw in their hieroglyphics what beyond all doubt they themselves never saw, and what no one who judged Christian modesty or truth to be more important than worldly vanity would ever see. But:

Οὐκ ἴδεν ἀλλ' ἐδόκησεν ἰδεῖν διὰ νύκτα σελήνην [He did not see, but thought he saw the moon by night].

XXIII. What Paul determined about the account of their religious observances we have shown; we have also produced the concurrence of Philo the Jew, spending his days in the Egyptian metropolis. Josephus is at length in reproaching them for the same crime, Bk. I Against Apion. Exod.

12:12, God threatens "to execute judgments against all the gods of Egypt."

Whatever that threatening amounted to, Moses narrates that it had its effect, Num. 33:4. That God slew among other cattle Apis himself, and the other animals sacred to the Egyptians, is not to be doubted. What those among the

pagans who seem to themselves to be wiser than us — and to us less mad than the Egyptians — thought of the religious worship of the Egyptians, is well known. The Satirist, Satire XV, 1-6:

"Who does not know, Volusius of Bithynia, what monstrous things Mad Egypt worships? One part adores the crocodile,

Another fears the Ibis, gorged on serpents.

The golden image of the sacred long-tailed ape shines bright … Here they venerate the pale-blue fish of the river, there the dog —

Whole cities worship it."

Anaxandrides in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, Bk. VII, addresses the Egyptians thus:

Οὐκ ἂν δυναίμην συμμαχεῖν ὑμῖν ἐγώ, Οὐθ' οἱ τρόποι γὰρ ὁμονοοῦσ' οὐθ' οἱ νόμοι Ἡμῶν, ἀπ' ἀλλήλων δὲ διέχουσιν πολύ.

… Κύνα σέβεις, τύπτω δ' ἐγώ· [I could not be your ally; for our customs and laws are not in agreement, but differ greatly from one another.

You worship the ox; I sacrifice it to the gods.

You hold the eel to be the greatest divinity; we regard it as by far the most excellent of relishes.

You revere the dog; I beat it.] And Antiphanes in Lycon:

Τῶν μὲν γὰρ εὐξαμένοισίν ἐσθ' ἡμῖν τυχεῖν· Τούτων δὲ δραχμὰς τουλάχιστον δώδεκα, Ἢ πλέον, ἀναλώσασιν ὀσφρᾶσθαι μόνον· Οὕτως ἐσθ' ἅγιον τελῶς τὸ θηρίον [They say the Egyptians are clever in other respects, but in counting the eel equal to the gods, for it is far more honoured than the gods.

The gods we can obtain by prayer alone, but to get even a smell of an eel costs at least twelve drachmas, or more.

So utterly sacred is the creature.] XXIV. Apollonius upbraids this infamy upon Thespesion, the chief of the Gymnosophists, in Philostratus, speaking of statues and images, Life of Apollonius, Bk. VI, ch. 19: Περὶ θεῶν, he says, ὑμᾶς ἐρωτήσομαι πρῶτον· τί μάθοντες, ἄτοπα καὶ γελοῖα θεῶν εἴδη παραδεδώκατε τοῖς δεῦρο ἀνθρώποις πλὴν ὀλίγων· ὀλίγων γὰρ, πάνυ μέντοι ὀλίγων, ἃ σοφῶς, καὶ θεοειδῶς ἵδρυται. Τὰ λοιπὰ δ' ὑμῶν ἱερὰ, ζώων ἀλόγων, καὶ ἀδόξων τιμαί, μᾶλλον ἢ θεῶν, φαίνονται — "Concerning the gods I will question you first: having learned what, did you hand down to the people here absurd and ridiculous forms of the gods — save a few; for few, very few indeed, are set up with wisdom and divine dignity? The rest of your temples appear to be honours of irrational and ignoble animals rather than of gods." What

Thespesion replies in return will not be unwelcome to the reader if he will consult the cited passage of the author. It appears moreover from the same

Philostratus that the Egyptians were utterly unable to give any account of their mad worship; however much Kircher, after the lapse of so many

centuries, pretends to have discovered in those monstrous gods all the mysteries of Christianity. Cicero thought they had one purpose in view:

"Those Egyptians who are mocked," he says, "consecrated no animal unless on account of some benefit they derived from it," Bk. I, On the Nature of the Gods. And to the Egyptians, in his own manner adding tragic colour,

Gildas joins the Britons, On the Ruin of Britain: "The portentous things of Britain," he says, "were almost the equals of the Egyptian in number, some of which we still see, with deformed features, stiffening in the usual fashion within and without the deserted walls, with stern countenances." Liberated by the grace of Christ, we all look upon these monsters of wickedness and this tyranny of the ancient serpent with astonishment and abomination; and therefore the impiety of those is most justly to be abominated who, while they wish to be called Christians, and to be thought alone worthy of that most holy name, are yet — as we hold them convicted by their own confessions — seized by the same, if not greater, madness. "More tolerable is the error of those who worship a golden, silver, or other material image in the manner of the Gentiles worshipping their gods, or a red cloth elevated on a spear — as is told of the Lapps — or living animals, as the Egyptians once did, than of those who worship a morsel of bread." These are the words of the Jesuit Coster, Enchiridion, ch. 8. Here, if we are men, if we are possessed of sense and reason, if any faith is to be given to the words of holy Scripture, we have confessed perpetrators, that such idolatry is found among the sons of the most holy father the pope as was never seen or heard of, even in the darkest depths of paganism.

XXV. When, moreover, the world of nations was burdened with the number of its gods, and men knew not what or whom they worshipped, the

expression "whoever you are" was customarily used in invocations. "Now I worship whatever God there is," Plautus, Rudens, I, 3. And:

"We follow thee, holy one among the gods, Whoever thou art."

— Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 576.

And in the Capitol, a shield was consecrated with the inscription, "To the Genius of the city of Rome, whether male or female."

XXVI. And hence that ancient formula of evoking gods from places besieged in war, which Macrobius recalls from the fragments of Sammonicus: "If there is a god or goddess in whose protection this people and city stands — and you especially, who have taken the protection of this city and people under your charge — I pray and beseech you, and ask pardon from you, that you abandon this people and city, leave their places, temples, sacred rites, and city; depart from them and cast upon that people and city fear, terror, and forgetfulness; and having been betrayed, come to Rome to me and mine; let our city's places, temples, sacred rites, and city be more acceptable to you; and be set over me, the Roman people, and my soldiers, so that we may know and understand. If you shall do so, I vow to build temples and games for you."

XXVII. Hence, it was believed that the gods had deserted any city before it was overthrown. So, Virgil on the destruction of Troy:

"All the gods have departed, the shrines and altars abandoned, By whom this empire had stood."

— Aeneid, II, 351.

XXVIII. And the most ancient poets handed down that the gods were seen carrying their images out of the temples when destruction was already approaching. And in general, Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, 219:

[But, nonetheless, the report is that the gods abandon the city that is being taken.] XXIX. Hence the Romans wished it to remain concealed, in whose divine protection the city of Rome stood, lest gods called by their proper names should be able to be exaugurated [made profane/stripped of divinity] by the enemy. This was provided for by pontifical law. And the pontiffs themselves prayed thus: "Jupiter, best and greatest — or by whatever other name you would be called."

XXX. That these empty fictions ever pleased wise men and those desiring to live according to reason, I should wonder at beyond measure, were it not permitted to perceive daily by what tyranny over human minds vain superstition exercises itself. So after a fashion not unlike that which we cited from Sammonicus, when the Spanish forces at the battle of Saint

Quentin were compelled to demolish and destroy a temple dedicated to Saint Lawrence into which the enemy had retreated, King Philip bound himself by a vow to the saint that he would make good the loss by erecting another, and a much greater, temple. This was the occasion for the building of the Escorial, dedicated to Lawrence, which an anonymous poet has elegantly set out:

"This most splendid temple he built for you, O Lawrence, After Philip demolished at Saint Quentin's in war

Those that existed — since the enclosed enemy Had hid there beneath the trembling altars, and the divinity in vain.

To whom the king said: here too, let it be permitted me to take My vengeance and bury the hostile nation in the sacred ruins,

And to stain the altars with blood — I who am to give greater things."

XXXI. And plainly the form of ancient vows which Papinius celebrates in his Tydeus, Thebaid, Bk. II, 726-734:

"If I am borne against Parthaon's arms And on return the Martian Pleuron opens to me:

Then I will dedicate to you golden temples in the mid-hills of the city Where it is sweet to look down upon the Ionian storms,

And where turbid Achelous, raising the sea with his golden crest, Goes forth past the Echinades that lie before him.

Here I will fashion the battles of my ancestors and the formidable faces Of the great-souled kings, and hang their arms

On the proud domes."

XXXII. The ignorance of the true God is the fountain and origin of all evils. From it, those very ones whom impious and wicked little men had proposed to themselves to worship — foolish, idiotic, filthy, polluted with robberies, quarrels, wars, adulteries, and unspeakable sins — were served up to be ridiculed and imitated. And so the relics of natural light were extinguished; nor any greater care for the works of God manifesting his eternal power and divinity. Thus Hellenism — or the μυθική [mythical] theology of the Gentiles — prevailed at last. Hence, all the gods, the greater, the middle, and the lowest, came forth.

XXXIII. With what ruin those portentous fictions of the poets afflicted the human race with respect to honest morals, tranquil and rational life, the civil state, and the πρόληψιν [preconception] of eternal punishment — this is well known. One or two detestable examples will suffice to set out.

Saturn, who is Κρόνος [Kronos], was for them Χρόνος [Chronos], that is, Time. Thus, they made mythology out of natural theology. Also, Noah, from the most corrupt tradition. Time, that is, the space completed by the

motion of heaven. Hence, Saturn was the son of Uranus, or Heaven. In the same way, Noah is esteemed, since all others were destroyed in the πανωλεθρία [universal ruin] of the flood. Now they imagined that Saturn devoured his children and then vomited them up again — whether because, by turns, time produces all things, consumes, reabsorbs, and expels them; or because Noah enclosed his children with him in the ark and then, as it were, gave them back alive again to the world of nations — is uncertain. That the fable was composed from a very obscure tradition and an ingenious allegory is apparent. And so at last, by the help of Satan, there issued from this the horrible idol-madness. And monstrous cruelty was mixed with nefarious superstition. For foolish little men, applying I know not what unspeakable ceremonies in consolation for their wretchedness, sacrificed their own children to Saturn. Hence, it was called "the burial-place of boys."

XXXIV. But this wickedness appears to be older than all the Greek portentous fables also; that it received increase from them is beyond doubt.

And at last, it became catholic. Nor will any part of Satanic worship be found in which the human race conspired more harmoniously. Whether the ancient serpent — himself to be triumphed over on the cross of Christ — had it in mind to exalt himself magnificently here and to triumph over conquered sinners; or whether he meant to make prejudice and insult against the sacrifice in the minds of men — it is established that he poured forth all his venom far and wide in promoting this wickedness. Let us review a few examples. Concerning the Africans, the matter is well known:

"Infants among Africans were sacrificed openly to Saturn down to the proconsulship of Tiberius," Tertullian, Apology, ch. 8. Arnobius has the same. When the Carthaginians were defeated by Agathocles, king of the

Sicilians, thinking God to be angry with them — in order the more carefully to pay their expiation — they sacrificed two hundred sons of nobles to Saturn. Pescennius Festus in Lactantius is witness. Pressed by the Roman war, they performed the same sacred rites, and the son of Hannibal himself,

Aspar, was slain. Hence, Silius Italicus depicts his wife Imilce lamenting this crime, Punica, Bk. IV:

"But what is this piety — to sprinkle the shrines with blood?

Alas, the first causes of wickedness for suffering mortals Is not to know the nature of the gods; go, offer just prayers

With pious incense, and turn away the savage rites of slaughter.

God is gentle and akin to man: I pray only this — Let it suffice to have seen bullocks slain before the altars;

Or if so great a sin stands fixed and firm in the will, Take me, take me — who bore him — to your vows,

Why does it please you to strip the Libyan lands of this spirit?"

XXXV. Among the Romans, it was customary for living men to devote themselves to the gods of the underworld. The history of the Decii is well known: the father in the Gallic war, the son in the Samnite war, devoted themselves in the same manner. Juvenal celebrates them, Satire VIII, 254:

"The souls of the Decii were plebeian, plebeian their names:

Yet for entire legions, and for all the allies And all the Latin youth, They sufficed as offerings to the gods of the underworld and the parent earth; For the Decii were worth more than those they saved."

XXXVI. Arnobius affirms that it was once the custom to worship Jupiter Latiaris with murder. A senatorial decree was made in the consulship of

Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus that no man should be sacrificed. And that the monstrous rites had been practised openly until that time, Pliny narrates, Natural History, Bk. XXX, ch. 1. And so, when the Gauls were advancing: "The elder men, adorned with the most distinguished honours, assembled in the forum, and there, the pontiff officiating, devoted themselves to the gods of the shades," in Florus, Bk. I,

13.

XXXVII. That the Gauls also were accustomed to propitiate the gods with these nefarious victims, Cicero narrates, Speech for Fonteius, X: "Who does not know," he says, "that they retain down to this day that savage and barbarous custom of the sacrifice of men?" Plutarch also reminds us that a Gaul and a Gaulish woman were customarily sacrificed at Rome every year.

The Roman emperor Hadrian sacrificed the catamite Antinous to the gods in Egypt. Ἀντίνοος ἐν τῇ Αἰγύπτῳ ἐτελεύτησεν, εἴτ' οὖν εἰς τὴν Νειλον ἐκπεσῶν, ὡς Ἁδριανὸς γράφει, εἴτε καὶ ἱερουργηθεὶς, ὡς ἡ ἀλήθεια ἔχει, says Dio in Xiphilinus, Bk. LXIX;— "Antinous died in Egypt, whether from falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or from being sacrificed, as is the truth." And he made the one who was sacrificed into a god. Procopius records that the inhabitants of Thule maintained this custom of sacrificing men down to his own time. The same custom among the Britons: when the island of Mona was conquered by Paulinus, "a garrison was placed over the conquered, and the groves sacred to savage superstitions were destroyed; for they held it lawful to drench the altars with captive blood and to consult the gods by human entrails," says Tacitus, Annals, Bk. XIV, ch. 30. And on that passage Horace:

"I shall visit the Britons, fierce to strangers."

Acro: "The Britons sacrificed their guests as victims." Lucan mentions the gods to whom the Gauls made offerings with human blood, I, 444:

"And those to whom, with dire blood, is appeased Teutates the pitiless, and Hesus dreadful with his savage altars,

And Taranis, no gentler than Scythian Diana."

XXXVIII. That all these were gods of the Britons, the most diligent Camden demonstrates in his Britannia; and Caesar himself records that the Gauls received the whole discipline of the Druids from the Britons, Gallic

War, Bk. VI. The same madness among the Germans: "Having slaughtered a man publicly, they perform the rites as dreadful first-fruits," says Tacitus.

And again: "Of the gods they worship Mercury above all, to whom on certain days they consider it lawful to propitiate even with human victims,"

On the Customs of Germany, IX. Camerarius records that marble monuments of this impiety among the Etruscans still survive, and that he himself saw one of them at Perugia, Historical Meditations, Bk. II.

Concerning the Goths, Jornandes: "They always appeased Mars with the most ferocious worship; for their victims were the deaths of captives." The Greeks were bound by the same wickedness. Erechthonius, the most ancient king of Attica, is said to have sacrificed his own two daughters. And Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, Bk. XIII, shows that Neanthe of Cyzicus devoted himself; and Epimenides expiated the whole land of Attica for certain ancient crimes with human blood — he who stood forth as the proposer to the Athenians of erecting an altar to the unknown God. Among the Thebans of Tyrian origin — from whom this superstition flowed — celebrated is Menoeceus, who devoted himself for the city, slew himself, and made offering with his own blood to the gods of the underworld.

Papinius Statius admirably celebrates his death, Thebaid, Bk. X, 756-769:

"But righteous Menoeceus, in a chosen part of the walls, Now sacred in aspect and more majestic than his wonted mien,

As if suddenly sent down to earth from the heavenly axle, Stood there, manifestly recognised with his helmet removed,

And looked down upon the ranks of men, and with a deep shout Turned the field, and commanded silence from the war. O gods of arms, and you, O Phoebus, who in so great a death Grant me to die — give joys to Thebes That I have pledged, and that I have bought with all my blood; …

Restore with my death to the Tyrians their temples, fields, homes, Marriages, and children, if as a gentle victim I have pleased you."

With these words, the poet marvellously painted the common sentiment of the nations concerning expiatory sacrifices, as also afterwards in the mother's lament:

"Did I rear you, illustrious boy, as a lustral offering For savage Thebes, and cherish your devoted head

As a cheap mother?" — 793, 794.

XXXIX. That the Tyrians sacrificed a free-born boy to Saturn, Curtius shows, Bk. IV, ch. 3. That the Egyptians sacrificed living men to their brute gods is testified by Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. The priests in his Clio, p. 158, narrated to Herodotus that Menelaus sacrificed two boys in Egypt.

"The Thracians make offerings of human blood to the gods," says Florus, History, Bk. III, ch. 4. The Celts, when sacrificing a man, strike him above the diaphragm with a sword, according to Diodorus, Bk. V. The Normans and Danes sacrificed ninety-nine men and as many horses together with

dogs to their gods every year in the month of January, according to Ditmar, Bk. X. Concerning the Massilians, Lucan, III, 303-305:

"Here, barbarous sacred rites of the gods, Altars built with mournful sacrifices, And every tree lustrated with human blood."

XL. Ἐθύετο καὶ ἐν Ῥόδῳ Μεταγειτνιῶνος ἕκτῃ ἱσταμένου ἄνθρωπος τῷ Κρόνῳ — "A man was sacrificed to Saturn in Rhodes on the sixth day of the month Metageitnion", says Theodoret, Bk. VII, On the Diseases of the Greeks. And, Φοίνικες ἐν ταῖς μεγάλαις συμφοραῖς ἢ πολέμων, ἢ αὐχμῶν, ἢ λοιμῶν, ἐθύοντο τῶν φιλτάτων τινὰ ἐπιψηφίζοντες Κρόνῳ, says

Porphyry, On Abstinence from Animal Food, Bk. II — "The Phoenicians in great disasters — whether of wars, droughts, or plagues — sacrificed some one of their dearest to Saturn, the victim chosen by common vote." Even

God's own people were invaded by the universal pestilence. "They sacrificed their sons and daughters to demons, and shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan," Ps. 106:37, 38. Whoever wants more, let him add what we noted in the little book On Divine Justice, ch. 8. That certain Christians — at least in name — defiled themselves with this crime, I would show, did not shame prevent me.

XLI. Porphyry, as Eusebius testifies, Praeparatio Evangelica, Bk. I, ch.

9, traces the origin of these sacrifices to Abraham, calling him Saturn; and his daughter, born of Queen Anobret, is said to have been sacrificed. This kind of disgraceful ἀνιστορησίαν [failure to investigate/lack of inquiry into] the origins of things and nations is well known to be displayed everywhere by profane writers. Varro thinks that the ancients devised this kind of sacrifice because the human race is the best of all seeds. The Druids, as

Caesar testifies, Gallic War, Bk. VI, were of the opinion that the majesty of the immortal gods could not be propitiated, except by the life of a man rendered for the life of a man. That the human race drew the use of sacrifices from an ancient and universal tradition for the expiation of sins is clear. That the just and greatest God could be propitiated by the blood of cattle on account of the sins of men, anxious and doubtful minds, agitated by horror and the sense of their sins, could never fully persuade themselves.

Satan accosts those who are solicitous and almost in despair, after his manner. He easily persuades men that they have nothing more precious than themselves. Hence, the impulse to sacrifice oneself and others. The prophet shows that a conscience tormented and terrified by the sense of sin and fear of punishment was the bottom of this evil, Mic. 6:7. With Satan as midwife, this monster was brought to light. They often received no other answer from the oracles — whether they feared some great thing or were about to dare it

— than that propitiation must be made with human blood. The histories of Menoeceus and Iphigenia are well known. Apollonius narrates in Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, Bk. VI, ch. 10, that the Lacedaemonian custom of scourging themselves in the worship of the gods had no other origin: Τὸ δέ, he says, τῶν μαστίγων ἔθος τῇ Ἀρτέμιδι τῇ ἀπὸ Σκυθῶν δρᾶται, χρησμῶν φασιν ἐξηγουμένων ταῦτα, θεοῖς δ' ἀντινομοθετεῖν μανία, οἶμαι — that is, "The custom of the scourges is practised in honour of Artemis from Scythia, because, they say, oracles prescribed these things, and to legislate against the gods is madness, I think." And Pausanias,

Boetica: Ἀφίκετο ἅμα ἐκ Δελφῶν τῷ Διονύσῳ θύειν παῖδα ὡραῖον — "The oracle from Delphi directed that a beautiful boy should be sacrificed to Dionysus." Things exactly like this occur everywhere in the historians; until this point of ascent, Satanic malice found no higher to climb.

XLII. But there is no end to this impious heap. The adulteries and lewdness also of the most base gods are well known to have been for very many an incitement and apology for committing all manner of impure villanies. Let me add this as a second example. For after they had devised those gods as like themselves — that is, liars, perjurers, and polluted with every impurity — they immediately also devised those things about them.

Remove the quarrels, lies, battles, perjuries, and adulteries of the gods — certain ancient writers, who now stride with gigantic step, will be dwarfed and diminutive; and by them, alas, Christian youth is still being defiled — and to that Moloch, as the learned and pious Johann Comenius complains, it is being offered. I am unwilling to foist upon chaste ears, by repetition, the most foul wickednesses which ought to be forever silent among the holy. A few things may be recalled to show to what end the devil suggested these things to the minds of wicked men — let that suffice which Mercury says of Jupiter in Plautus, Prologue to the Amphitryon:

"For I think you know already how my father is:

How free he is in unavenged matters of this kind, And how great a lover, when something has once pleased him."

And:

"How often he takes on lesser forms, Himself who leads the heaven and the clouds."

— Seneca, Hippolytus.

XLIII. Ah, how often does the wet and soft clay drink in blasphemies of this kind, to the applause of a foolish performer. Augustine speaks admirably: "All the worshippers of such gods, as soon as lust has inflamed them, burning — as Persius says — dipped in hot poison, look more at what shameful things they have done than at what Plato has taught or Cato has

censured," City of God, Bk. II, ch. 7. The reader will find more concerning the most impure worship of the Mother of the Gods in that passage. What minds and dispositions, from the examples proposed to them, the human race — of itself already too prone to vices — conceived, Terence sets before the eyes of all in his Chaerea, Eunuchus, Act III, Scene 5, 35:

"While things were being prepared, the girl sat in the inner room Looking at a certain painted picture, in which was this painting:

The story of how Jupiter once sent a shower of gold into the lap of Danae.

I myself also began to look at it; and because he had once played A similar game long ago, my soul rejoiced the more:

That a god transformed himself into a man, and came secretly Through another's roof, through the skylight, to trick a woman.

But what a god! He who shakes the highest temples of heaven with his thunder.

Should I, a little man, not do this? I did indeed do it — and gladly."

XLIV. Would that from dishonest pictures and the reading of the poets, the same ruin was no longer being inflicted upon the minds of youth. But this impiety advanced so far that they openly exhorted one another to commit the most foul crimes by the example of the gods. So Catullus,

LXVIII, 137-140:

"Lest we be troublesome in the manner of fools, Even Juno, greatest of the heaven-dwellers, Often burned at her husband's daily fault, Knowing the many thefts of all-willing Jove."

XLV. It was also the custom of very many to worship the gods by the worst villanies. That the Babylonians prostituted their own daughters in the temples is narrated by Herodotus, Bk. I, and Strabo, Geography, Bk. XVI.

XLVI. Another no less deadly pestilence, arising from this impiety, settled upon the world of nations. For after that nefarious persuasion concerning the gods had prevailed among the common people, the most wicked scoundrels — especially those who were in the service of those gods from the sacred rites — fashioning their names and customs, committed and practised innumerable villanies, robberies, adulteries, thefts, and brigandage. In mountains, caves, woods, temples, on the banks of rivers, and on the seashores, all places were full of such phantoms. Let the most well-known history of the crime perpetrated in the temple of Isis at Rome, which Josephus relates, Antiquities, Bk. XVIII, ch. 4, serve as an example.

Mundus, a Roman knight, having long tried in vain to storm the chastity of the most honourable matron Paulina, was brought secretly into the temple by the priests under the name of Anubis, with the consent of the woman's husband, and violated her. The ancient heroes were, for the most part, the spurious and illegitimate offspring of robbers, brigands, tyrants, and priests.

XLVII. And the distinguished historian gives this account — and not absurdly — of why Romulus did not institute Vestal virgins: Οὔτε, he says, διὰ παρθένων τὰς θεραπείας κατεστήσατο τῇ θεῷ, μεμνημένος, ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ, τοῦ περὶ τὴν μητέρα πάθους, ᾗ συνέβη θεραπευούσῃ τὴν θεὸν, τὴν παρθενίαν ἀποβαλεῖν, οὐχ' ἱκανὸς ἐσόμενος ἐάν τινα θυηπόλων εὕρῃ διεφθαρμένην, κατὰ τοὺς πατρίους τιμωρήσασθαι νόμους, διὰ τὴν ἐπὶ ταῖς οἰκείαις συμφοραῖς ἀνάμνησιν — that is, "Nor did he appoint virgin priestesses of the goddess; mindful" (as it seems to me) "of his mother's disgrace, who in the service of that goddess had lost her virginity" (violated, that is, by a priest), "nor would he have been able, if he had found any of the goddess's sacrificing women to have violated their modesty, to punish

her according to ancestral laws, on account of the recollection of the family disgrace," Dionysius of Halicarnassus, History, Bk. II, ch. 65.

XLVIII. In the same manner, the Roman sacrificing priests, throughout all the time that the authority of ignorance prevailed everywhere and the papacy held evangelical truth captive, dared to perpetrate, disguised, all manner of crimes — no one among the papists themselves, unless he is brazenly shameless, dares to deny. For after they had persuaded the blind and stupid crowd that certain genial spirits, not greatly hostile to the human race, frequented houses by night and did what it is shameful to relate, they themselves, disguised in their name, actually carried out all those most foul wickednesses which they wished, falsely, most absurdly, and ridiculously, to ascribe to those harmless genial spirits. So our Chaucer, of a certain friary of his time, most well known:

"For there as wont to walken was an elf, There walketh now the Limitor himself.

In every bush, and under every tree, There is none other incubus but he."

XLIX. That from this, the observance of virtue was rendered almost impossible for the Greeks — upbraiding this impiety upon Apollonius — the Indian philosopher Iarchas affirms in Philostratus, Life of Apollonius,

Bk. III, ch. 7: Οἱ δέ γε σοφώτατοι ποιηταὶ ἡμῶν, οὐδ' εἰ βούλεσθε δίκαιοί τε καὶ χρηστοὶ εἶναι ξυγχωροῦσιν ὑμῖν γίνεσθαι — "But your most reputed wise men among your poets do not permit you to be just and good even if you should wish." And he adds the reason: that they held the most wicked men in the place of gods. And Apollonius himself openly acknowledged this, Bk. V, ch. 5: Οἱ μὲν γὰρ, he says, περὶ τοὺς ἥρωας, ὧν ποιητικὴ πᾶσα ἔχεται, καὶ διαφθείρουσι τοὺς ἀκροωμένους, ἐπειδὴ ἔρωτάς τε ἀτόπους οἱ

ποιηταὶ ἑρμηνεύουσι, καὶ ἀδελφῶν γάμους καὶ διαβολὰς ἐς θεοὺς, καὶ βρώσεις παίδων, καὶ πανουργίας ἀνελευθέρους, καὶ δίκας, καὶ τὸ ὡς γεγονὼς αὐτῶν ἄγειν, καὶ τὸν ἐρῶντα, καὶ τὸν ζηλοποιοῦντα, καὶ τὸν ἐπιθυμοῦντα πλουτεῖν, ἢ τυραννεύειν ἐφ' ἅπερ οἱ μῦθοι — that is, "For the things invented about the heroes — of which the whole material of the poets consists — also corrupt the ears of their hearers; for the poets narrate their unlawful and nefarious loves, such as marriages of brothers and sisters, and slanders against the gods, and the eating of children, and illiberal mutual altercations; for since these are set forth by the poets as if they were actual deeds, they lead men to love and envy, and the desire of wealth and of sovereignty." Nor can anyone think that he is sinning, while he imitates the gods. Marcus Tullius also repeats the same things in the first book On the Nature of the Gods, ch. 16: "I have set out," he says, "the judgments not so much of philosophers as of madmen in their dreams; for the things poured forth in the words of poets were not much more absurd, and harmed by their very sweetness — since they introduced gods inflamed with anger and raging with lust, and made us see their wars, battles, combats, and wounds, their hatreds moreover, quarrels, and discords, their births and deaths, complaints and lamentations, lusts poured forth in every kind of intemperance, adulteries, chains, and concubinage with the human race, and mortals begotten from the immortal." What Plato discoursed on this matter in the Timaeus, let the reader consult — for it is worth reading.

L. The lawgivers and philosophers were enlisted in support of the poets. It pleased them to forge a certain natural theology, which in reality was nothing other than the idolatry of the first apostates in the worship of the works of creation. For the benefit of traditions having been lost — utterly destroyed, that is, by the fables of the poets — and with the prejudices of

the minds of the common people furthermore insuperable, neither lawgivers nor philosophers were ever able, scarcely even attempted, to free natural theology from impure and most pernicious fables and idolatrous worship.

LI. Now, the lawgivers in forging their theology had almost nothing other in mind than to temper religion in such a way that no disturbances or evils might arise from it in the civil state. This is still the opinion of the majority of politicians about religion. They were therefore under the necessity of inscribing all the errors and fables, and the whole idol-madness with which the poets had infected the people, into the tablets of the laws — provided they did not openly, as they say, γυμνῇ τῇ κεφαλῇ [with bare head], contradict the public governance of cities or honest morals.

LII. It is worthwhile to behold Plato himself yielding to the prejudices of the common people. Thus, in the Timaeus: Περὶ δὲ τῶν ἄλλων δαιμόνων εἰπεῖν καὶ γνῶναι τὴν γένεσιν μείζον ἢ καθ' ἡμᾶς· πιστέον δὲ τοῖς εἰρηκόσιν ἔμπροσθεν, ἐκγόνοις μὲν θεῶν οὖσιν, ὡς ἔφασαν, σαφῶς δὲ που τούς γε αὐτῶν προγόνους εἰδόσιν. Ἀδύνατον οὖν θεῶν παισὶν ἀπιστεῖν, καί περ ἄνευ τε εἰκότων καὶ ἀναγκαίων ἀποδείξεων λέγουσιν, ἀλλ' ὡς οἰκεῖα φάσκουσιν ἀπαγγέλλειν ἐπομένους τῷ νόμῳ πιστευτέον οὕτως οὖν κατ ̓ ἐκείνους ἡμῖν ἡ γένεσις περὶ τούτων τῶν θεῶν ἐχέτω καὶ λεγέσθω — that is, "Concerning the other daemons, to speak of and know their generation is too great for our powers; but faith must be given concerning them to those who previously explained the nature of the gods to us, since they were indeed the offspring of the gods, as they themselves affirmed, and therefore knew their own ancestors clearly. For faith cannot be withheld from the children of the gods, even though they speak without probable signs or necessary arguments; but since they claim to report matters concerning their own family, following the ancient law and custom,

faith must be given to them. Thus, then, as it has been handed down by them, let the origin of these gods be held." So he says — mindful, that is, of what had happened to his teacher Socrates, who was condemned to death because he was unwilling to have those as gods whom the city held to be gods. He therefore admits the popular gods, though not without open ridicule of the credulity of the common people. He discourses on similar things in the second book of the Republic. Strabo, Geography, Bk. I, first teaches that the lawgivers deliberately devised fables in religion for the purpose of restraining the minds of the peoples by a certain terror of invisible evils: Κεραυνός, he says, καὶ αἰγὶς, καὶ τρίαινα, καὶ λαμπάδες, καὶ δράκοντες, καὶ θυρσόλεγχω τῶν θεῶν ὅπλα, μύθοι, καὶ πᾶσα θεολογία ἀρχαϊκή· ταῦτα δ' ἀπεδείξαντο οἱ τὰς πολιτείας καταστησάμενοι μορμολύκας τινὰς πρὸς τοὺς νηπιόφρονας [The thunderbolt, aegis, trident, torches, dragons, and thyrsus-spears — the weapons of the gods — are myths, and so is all ancient theology; these were employed by those who founded political constitutions as certain bugbears against the simpleminded]. And thus, it was once done by the sacrificing priests in the papacy.

For after they had extirpated all the efficacy of the Christian religion from the minds of the common people by the grossest ignorance and criminal morals, they found it necessary to invent purgatory, and I know not what other terrors, in order to keep the people in their duty in some manner.

LIII. And this was the πολιτική [civil] theology of the Gentiles.

Concerning its rites, Seneca says: "All these things the wise man will observe as commanded by the laws, not as pleasing to the gods." Since, therefore, the common people refused to have their poetic frenzies taken from them, and was willing to be deprived of its city rather than of its criminal opinion about religion — and since the lawgivers were content to

seize all the ancient fables for their own ends — the wise utterly repudiated this whole civil theology as a fable devised for the purpose of maintaining order among men in civil life. The bad merchandise was therefore of little value and was always lightly esteemed.

LIV. The philosophers seemed more clear-sighted. They surveyed all things most shrewdly, investigating the ruined theology. But, to say it in a word, they could not extricate themselves from the corrupt traditions and the portentous fictions of the poets, except by the help of opinions drawn from the pits of atheism. From these arose the φυσική [natural] theology.

That this was the εὕρημα [invention] of men hardened in the greatest wickedness and knowing not how to yield to truth, Eusebius shows so clearly in his books on the Praeparatio Evangelica that there is nothing to add to what he says. And so "that race of men also was made most vain, and their foolish heart was darkened."

LV. And by these gradations, all knowledge of God was corrupted. Now, among bad methods of religious practice, not the worst appears to have been retained by the common people — those who knew nothing beyond the obscure traditions and the portentous fictions interpolated with fables.

Those who aspired to the praise of the most subtle investigation and acumen in sacred things were made utterly ἐμωράνθησαν [fools]. The old opinion concerning a judgment of some kind to be exercised after this life, and the diverse condition of men surviving in the underworld, prevailed among the common people. It never willingly dissented from this opinion.

How great a moment this persuasion brought to the restraint of the wickedness and impiety rampant on earth is plain. Even after all that theology of the former ages was at last entirely blotted out everywhere among the nations, yet those who live outside the knowledge of Christ have

some foreboding — I know not what — of that judgment and future state.

But the almost universal senate of philosophers laughed at that whole opinion as an empty bugbear — whether with γέλωτα σαρδάνιον [a Sardonic laugh], I cannot tell.

LVI. And this was the superstition of the nations. It has pleased us to express δεισιδαιμονίαν [superstition] by that word. The account of the ὀνοματολογίας [nomenclature] varies. The father of Roman eloquence affirms that superstition was so named from those who prayed all day long that their sons might survive them. The comic poets testify that parents were daily bent on this vow:

"As you would wish your only son To survive your life, safe and in health."

— Plautus, Asinaria, Act I, Sc. 1, 6.

"By Castor, a fine boy has been born to Pamphilus; I pray the gods that he may survive."

— Terence, Andria, Act III, Sc. 2.

And in the Heautontimorumenos, Act V, Sc. 4, 7:

"So may he survive for me and for this man."

Servius explains it from old women who, having long survived and being addicted to empty things, "while they wish to appear excessively religious, dote." Donatus agrees: "The superstitious are old men and old women who, having long survived in age, now dote" — hence also "the superstitious are those who fear the gods too much," which is a sign of dotage. Hence the Satirist:

"Lo, a grandmother or a god-fearing aunt Has lifted the child from the cradle, and with infamous finger

And lustral saliva applied first,

She expiates his forehead and his wet lips."

— Persius, Satire II, 31-34.

This custom is retained in the baptism of the papists. Lactantius takes the "superstitious" to mean those "who celebrate the memory of the dead who have survived," Institutes, Bk. II, ch. 28. Also, the superstitious man is one who is ἔνθεος [divinely inspired] and θέσφατος [prophetic]. So Plautus:

"This man is indeed superstitious — he declares true things," Curculio, Act III, 27. Superstition denotes either a corrupt affection of the soul concerning divine things, or a vain and absurd worship. About the former, Cicero and Plutarch have said very many things, most of them most falsely — the one scattered throughout his works, the other in a special and elegant treatise On Superstition [περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας]. In the latter sense, Tacitus impiously calls our religion a deadly superstition, Annals, Bk. XV; and Suetonius calls

Christians "a race of men of a new and harmful superstition," in his Nero.

Some even rejected all religion under the name of superstition:

"Vain superstition; virtue alone is goddess in the heart."

LVII. Would that no one could be found today who was mad with this madness. But although the religion of the pagans was nothing other than a most pernicious superstition, they themselves acknowledged a distinction and maintained that this was necessary on account of the promiscuous multitude who would not be restrained without it. Strabo speaks admirably:

Λαμία μῦθός ἐστι, καὶ ἡ γοργὼ, καὶ ὁ Ἐφιάλτης, καὶ ἡ μορμολύκη, οἵ τε πολλοὶ τῶν τὰς πόλεις οἰκούντων, εἰς μὲν προτροπὴν ἄγονται τοῖς ἡδέσι τῶν μύθων, ὅταν ἀκούωσι τῶν ποιητῶν ἀνδραγαθήματα μυθώδη διηγουμένων, οἷον Ἡρακλέος ἄθλους ἢ Θήσεως, ἢ τιμὰς παρὰ τῶν θεῶν νεμεμημένας, ἢ νὴ Δία ὁρῶσι γραφὰς ἢ ξίανα ἢ πλάσματα τοιαύτην τινὰ περιπέτειαν ὑποσημαίνοντα μυθώδη. Εἰς ἀποτροπὴν δὲ ὅταν, κολάσεις

παρὰ θεῶν καὶ φόβους, καὶ ἀπειλὰς ἢ διὰ λόγων ἢ διὰ τόπων ἀώρων προσδέχονται, ἢ καὶ πιστεύουσι περιπεσεῖν τινάς· οὐ γὰρ ὄχλον τε γυναικῶν καὶ παντὸς χυδαίου πλήθους ἐπαγαγεῖν λόγῳ δυνατὸν φιλοσόφῳ καὶ προσκαλέσασθαι πρὸς εὐσέβειαν καὶ ὁσιότητα καὶ πίστιν, ἀλλὰ δεῖ καὶ διὰ δεισιδαιμονίας [Lamia is a myth, and so are the Gorgon,

Ephialtes, and the Mormolyke; and the common people who inhabit the cities are incited toward virtue by the pleasurable myths, when they hear the poets narrating mythical deeds of valour — such as the labours of Heracles or Theseus, or the honours distributed by the gods, or indeed when they see paintings or wooden images or sculptures indicating some such mythical adventure; and they are turned away from evil when they receive, whether through words or through ominous places, punishments from the gods, and fears and threats, or even believe that certain people have fallen into such misfortune; for it is not possible by a philosophical argument to draw a crowd of women and all the common throng to piety and holiness and faith

— superstition is also needed], Geography, Bk. I. Who would not think he was hearing the supreme pontiff speaking from his chair! The great Plato also admirably explains this vice everywhere: Ἔθος τε, he says, γυναιξί τε δὴ διαφερόντως πάσαις καὶ τοῖς ἀσθενοῦσι πάντῃ καὶ κινδυνεύουσι καὶ ἀποροῦσιν, ὅπῃ τις ἂν ἀπορῇ, καὶ τοὐναντίον ὅταν εὐπορίας τινὸς λάβωνται καθιεροῦν τε τὸ παρὸν ἀεὶ, καὶ θυσίας εὔχεσθαι καὶ ἱδρύσεις ὑπισχνεῖσθαι θεοῖς καὶ δαίμοσι, καὶ παισὶ θεῶν, ἔν τε φάσμασιν ἐγρηγορότας διὰ φόβους, καὶ ἐν ὀνείροις ὡς δ' αὕτως ὄψεις πολλὰς ἀπομνημονεύοντας, ἑκάσταισί τε αὐτῶν ἄκη ποιουμένους βωμοὺς καὶ ἱερὰ, πάσας μὲν οἰκίας, πάσας δὲ κώμας, ἔν τε καθαροῖς ἱδρυομένους ἐμπιπλάναι, καὶ ὅπη τις ἔτυχεν τῶν τοιούτων, Laws, Bk. X, near the end

— that is, "But it is the custom especially of all women, and of those who

are held by some notable weakness or live in some danger or suffer under heavy want — or contrarily when the abundance of anything flows in — always to consecrate what seems to be present, and to vow victims, and to promise statues to the gods and daemons and children of the gods; both when spectra appear to the waking from fears, and when recollecting many visions seen in dreams — when they seek to bring remedies to each of them, they fill all their houses and all their villages with altars and shrines, and dedicate these rites to places as if pure." In what other words one might paint that superstition which flourishes in the papacy ἐμφανικώτερος [more clearly], I for my part know not. So Cicero on religion and superstition, near the end of the second book On Divination: "Wherefore, as religion is to be propagated, which is connected with the knowledge of nature, so all the roots of superstition are to be torn out. For it presses and urges, and wherever you turn it pursues you — whether you have heard a soothsayer, or an omen, whether you have offered sacrifice, or seen a bird, whether you have seen a Chaldean or a haruspex, whether it has lightened, thundered, something has been struck by lightning from heaven, or something has been born or done that seems like a portent — of which it is necessary that something usually happens, so that it is never permitted to rest with a quiet mind." I have cited these things so that we may know that superstition, under every profession of religion of whatever kind, is everywhere like itself.

LVIII. For the rest, what pertains to the religion or superstition of the pagans has been handed down by very many to memory. What the account of religious observances was according to their mind — Varro, Cicero,

Ovid, Festus Pompeius, Macrobius, Censorinus, Pliny, and most historians in the life of Numa set out. It is certain that some ἀποσπασμάτια

[fragmentary particles] of truth lay hidden in the πατροπαραδότοις [ancestrally transmitted] rites. Of those things which fell from them either unwillingly, or while engaged in other matters, or while investigating truth itself — testimonies of purer theology — we have an ample enough harvest in Josephus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Theodoret,

Lactantius, Augustine, Steuchus Eugubinus, Mornaeus, Grotius, and innumerable others among the more recent. The absurdities, folly, impiety, fury, and madness of the whole worship and religion that prevailed among them — following the apostle in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans — Tertullian, Eusebius, Augustine, Theodoret, and others vigorously attack. Maimonides, Giraldus, Stuckius, Vossius, and Selden — with Hesiod, Cicero, Plutarch, Strabo, Pliny, and Seneca not dissenting — elegantly and clearly set out the origin, practice, and secrets of idolatry.

LIX. After religion had grown among the nations — emerging from that infinite accumulation of fables — into such a mass of superstition and idolatry that nothing more foolish or more repugnant to all natural theology could have been devised, the wisest of all at last began to be so ashamed of all the rites and the whole worship of the gods that beyond the contemplation of nature and the observance of the right and honourable they were willing to have nothing more in common with the gods. So of Socrates, Cicero, Academic Questions, Bk. I, 4: "Socrates," he says, "seems to me … to have brought philosophy down to common life, and to inquire about virtues and vices and about good and evil things in general; and to think that heavenly things are either remote from our knowledge, or that even if they were fully known, they would contribute nothing to living well." And Tacitus, Annals VI, ch. 22: "As I listen to these and similar things, my judgment is in suspense — whether the affairs of mortals are

rolled about by fate and immutable necessity, or by chance; for you will find the wisest of the ancients, and those who emulate their school, of different opinions; and the opinion is implanted in many that neither our beginnings nor our end, nor finally men, are objects of care to the gods."

And Seneca: "So shall we worship, that we remember that the worship of him pertains rather to custom than to the matter itself." These correspond to the words with which Marcus Tullius closes his most learned books, On the Nature of the Gods: "When these things had been said, we parted, so that Velleius judged the discourse of Cotta to be truer, but to me the discourse of Balbus seemed more inclined to the semblance of truth." And so he had previously set out the sentiment of his own mind on all divine matters at the beginning of the first book (ch. 5): "We are not," he says, "those to whom nothing seems true; but those who say that certain false things are mixed with all true things, of such great likeness that there is in them no certain mark for judging and giving assent."

LX. That they should fluctuate thus pleased Satan, because he had nothing certain to put in place of the truths he had taken away. Hence, when the Athenians consulted the Pythian Apollo as to which religions they should especially maintain, the oracle was given — those which were in the custom of the ancestors, as the same Cicero testifies, On the Laws. And so, at last, among all the wisest and best, consent was given to that religion which Lucan ascribes to Cato:

"This was the firm resolve of stern Cato — To keep the mean, to hold the end, To follow nature, to spend his life for his country,

And to believe himself born not for himself alone, but for all the world.

To him a feast was to have overcome hunger; a great household,

To have kept off winter with a roof; a precious garment, To have drawn over his limbs the rough toga in the Roman manner.

And for him the greatest use of Venus was offspring; He is father and husband to the city; A devotee of justice, a strict keeper of the honourable;

Good for the common weal."

— Bk. II, 381-391.

Persius also speaks admirably for that state of things and the uncertainty under which all were agitated:

"What help is it to bring our morals into the temples, And to deduce good things for the gods from this sinful flesh?

Tell me, O pontiffs, what does gold do in the sacred precinct?

Surely the same as a doll given by a maiden to Venus.

Why do we not give to the gods above what from a great dish The bleary offspring of great Messalla could not give?

A will composed of right and law, and the sacred recesses Of the mind, and a breast saturated with noble honesty —

These let me bring near the temples, and I will propitiate with spelt."

— Satire II, 62, etc.

LXI. At last, wearied of fables, they poured themselves out in contempt of the gods on every occasion that presented itself. Let the most religious orator himself serve as an example — in his speech For His Home to the pontiffs, against Clodius: "You deny that what I am accustomed to announce about myself is tolerable; and as a clever man you even introduce an urbane and witty discourse: that I am accustomed to say that I am

Jupiter, and that I continually declare that Minerva is my sister. I am not so arrogant as to say that I am Jupiter, as I am uneducated in thinking that

Minerva is the sister of Jupiter. But yet, I take to myself a virgin sister; you did not allow your sister to remain a virgin. But see whether you ought to call yourself Jupiter — since you can rightfully call the same woman both sister and wife," ch. 34.

LXII. Also, when Antony drunk pretended to be Bacchus, the Athenians publicly pledged their Minerva to him with solemn ceremonies, according to Dio, History, Bk. XLVIII. Nor was there any expectation of help or assistance from the gods when men were placed in danger. Hence, when

King Porus, at the urging of his friends, was advised to sacrifice to the river so that it should not receive the Macedonian rafts and should not make the crossing easy for Alexander, he replied, Οὐκ ἔστι τῶν ὅπλα ἐχόντων τὸ καταρᾶσθαι — "It is not for those who bear arms to supplicate," as related by the wise Indians in Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, Bk. II, ch. 10.

LXIII. Those who consider Nero to be numbered among men may see in Suetonius how he treated the gods. And not without reason Seneca, in the Octavia, Act 2, ascribed to him that saying which — as the prophet testifies,

Isa. 44 — would suit all idolaters well enough:

"How foolishly shall I fear the gods, whom I myself make?"

Nor otherwise in the greatest of poets, Achilles, Iliad, X, 15, 20:

Ἔβλαψάς μ', Ἑκάεργε, θεῶν ὁλοώτατε πάντων, … Ἦ σ' ἂν τισαίμην, εἴ μοι δύναμίς γε παρείη.

[You have harmed me, Far-worker, most destructive of all the gods … Would that I might take vengeance on you, if I had the power.]

"But you, Titan, most wicked of the gods, have wronged me — You, impudent one, shall pay me, if I have the strength."

And Propertius:

"Good mind, if you are a goddess, I dedicate to your shrine:

So many prayers of mine have fallen on deaf Jove."

LXIV. But Tertullian acutely — that is, after his manner — attacks all this impiety in his Apology: "Household gods," he says, "whom you call lares, you treat with domestic power — pawning, selling, exchanging them — sometimes Saturnus from a saucepan, sometimes Minerva from a ladle, as each is worn and battered; they are worshipped so long as each master has experienced a holier domestic necessity."

LXV. Having set out the cradle and progress of the Gentiles' theology, its catastrophe must be briefly dispatched. God has indeed determined from the laying of the foundations of the world, at the appointed time, to send φῶς εἰς ἀποκάλυψιν ἐθνῶν [light for the revelation of the nations]. But he was pleased to conceal this mystery in himself for so long while he permitted all nations to walk in their own ways, until — covered in the densest darkness and every wretchedness — that saving light might at last shine out the more graciously upon them. Nevertheless, this counsel of his will, in the archive of infinite wisdom, he did not so immeasurably conceal as not to allow both the promises of this grace and horrible threatenings to proceed from the highest mercy toward the human race, and from the most just and most holy wrath against false, empty, and worthless gods and idols. For "Jehovah is the true God, the living God and the everlasting King: at his anger the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to endure his indignation.

Thus," he says, "shall you say to them: the gods that have not made the heavens and the earth — these shall perish from the earth and from under these heavens," Jer. 10:10, 11. Similarly, he threatens to make lean all the gods of the earth, Zeph. 2:11. Now it is established that God aimed these threatenings against those fictitious gods and idols — under whose auspices, and doing the bidding of whose instigation (that is, the ancient

serpent in them), the four most famous empires had made continual war upon him and his people. But concerning all of these, it is long since done.

They departed from the shrines; their heaven and sun, mountains and islands, have fallen; they themselves, together with all their worship, theatrical apparatus, and worshippers, have been moved from the earth and from the regions beneath heaven. At the first gleam indeed of the sun of righteousness arising, the idolatrous world perceived and mourned that its gods nodded — indeed, shuddered:

"The oracles of Delphi cease, And darkness condemns the human race to ignorance of the future."

— Juvenal, Satire VI, 554.

And nowhere do the wisest of the Gentiles play the fool more than in assigning the causes of the cessation of the oracles. "It may be," says

Cicero, On Divination, Bk. I, 19, "that that force of the earth which aroused the mind of the Pythia with divine inspiration has evaporated with age, just as we see that certain rivers have evaporated and dried up, or have been turned and deflected into another course." Plutarch agrees. And no one brings anything better.

LXVI. But gradually emitting his saving light, God at last so established the old oracles that there is no mortal anywhere among the nations who makes use of that Gentile theology, or worships those ancient idols with the ancient rites, or venerates them. Thus, all those things by which, through so many centuries and an unspeakable series of time, from the cunning of Satan and the native blindness of the human mind, the world lying in the wicked one had made natural theology vain, absurd, blasphemous, polluted, defiled, and useless — have perished root and branch from the sentence of God the avenger.

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