II. And so it is with the subjects of our present discourse. Atheism, which is a faulty judgement that there is nothing blessed or imperishable, seems to work round through disbelief in the Divine to actual apathy; its object in not acknowledging Gods is that it may not fear them. Superstition is shown by its very name to be a state of opinion charged with emotion and productive of such fear as debases and crushes the man; he thinks that there are Gods, but that they are |C| grievous and hurtful. The atheist appears to be unmoved at the mention of the Divine; the superstitious is moved, but in a wrong and perverted sense. Ignorance has produced in the one disbelief of the power which is helping him, in the other a superadded idea that it is hurting. Hence atheism is theory gone wrong, superstition is ingrained feeling, the outcome of false theory.
III. Now all diseases and affections of the soul are discreditable, but there is in some of them a gaiety, a loftiness, a distinction, which come of a light heart; we may say that none of these is wanting in a strong active impulse. Only there is this common charge to be laid against every such affection, that by stress of the active impulse it forces and |D| constrains the reason. Fear alone, as deficient in daring as it is in reason, keeps the irrational part inoperative, without resource or shift. Hence it has been called by two names, ‘Deima’ and ‘Tarbos’,[[264]] because it at once constricts and vexes the soul. But of all fears that which comes of superstition is most inoperative, and most resourceless. The man who never sails fears not the sea, nor the non-combatant, war; the home-keeping man fears no robbers, the poor no informers, the plain citizen no envy, the dweller among the Gauls[[265]] no earthquake, among the Ethiopians no thunder. The man who fears the Gods fears everything, land, sea; air, sky; darkness, light; sound, silence; to dream, to wake. Slaves forget |E| their masters while they sleep, sleep eases the prisoner’s chain; angry wounds, ulcers that raven and prey upon the flesh, and agonizing pains, all stand aloof from men that sleep:
Dear soothing sleep, that com’st to succour pains,
How sweet is thy approach in this my need.[[266]]
Superstition does not allow a man to say this; she alone has no truce with sleep, and suffers not the soul to breathe awhile, and |F| take courage, and thrust away its bitter heavy thoughts about the God. The sleep of the superstitious is a land of the ungodly, where blood-curdling visions, and monstrous whirling phantoms, and sure penalties are awake; the unhappy soul is hunted by dreams out of every spell of sleep it has, lashed and punished by itself, as though by some other, and receives injunctions horrible and revolting. Then when they have risen out of sleep, they do not scorn it all, or laugh it down, or perceive that none of the things which vexed them was real, but, escaped from the shadow of an illusion with no harm in it, they fall upon a vision of the day and deceive themselves outright, and spend |166| money to vex their souls, meeting with quacks and charlatans who tell them:
If nightly vision fright thy sleep,
Or hags their hellish revel keep,[[267]]
call in the wise woman, and take a dip into the sea, then sit on the ground, and remain so a whole day.
Ah! Greeks, what ills outlandish have ye found,[[268]]
namely, by superstition—dabbling in mud, plunges into filth, keepings of Sabbaths, falling on the face, foul attitudes, weird prostrations. Those who were concerned to keep music regular used to enjoin on singers to the harp to sing ‘with |B| mouth aright’. But we require that men should pray to the gods with mouth aright and just; not to consider whether the tongue of the victim be clean and correct, while they distort their own and foul it with absurd outlandish words and phrases, and transgress against the divine rule of piety as our fathers knew it. The man in the comedy has a passage which puts it happily to those who plate their bedsteads with gold and silver: