What an infamous idea, to imagine that a priest of Isis and Cybele, by playing cymbals and castanets, will reconcile you to the Divinity. And what then is this priest of Cybele, this vagrant eunuch, who lives on your weakness, and sets himself up as a mediator between heaven and you? What patent has he received from God? He receives money from you for muttering words; and you think that the Being of Beings ratifies the utterance of this charlatan!
There are innocent superstitions; you dance on festival days, in honor of Diana or Pomona, or some one of the secular divinities of which your calendar is full; be it so. Dancing is very agreeable; it is useful to the body; it exhilarates the mind; it does no harm to any one; but do not imagine that Pomona and Vertumnus are much pleased at your having jumped in honor of them, and that they may punish you for having failed to jump. There are no Pomona and Vertumnus but the gardener's spade and hoe. Do not be so imbecile as to believe that your garden will be hailed upon, if you have missed dancing the pyrrhic or the cordax.
There is one superstition which is perhaps pardonable, and even encouraging to virtue—that of placing among the gods great men who have been benefactors to mankind. It were doubtless better to confine ourselves to regarding them simply as venerable men, and above all, to imitating them. Venerate, without worshipping, a Solon, a Thales, a Pythagoras; but do not adore a Hercules for having cleansed the stables of Augeas, and for having lain with fifty women in one night.
Above all, beware of establishing a worship for vagabonds who have no merit but ignorance, enthusiasm, and filth; who have made idleness and beggary their duty and their glory. Do they who have been at best useless during their lives, merit an apotheosis after their deaths? Be it observed, that the most superstitious times have always been those of the most horrible crimes.
SECTION V.
The superstitious man is to the knave, what the slave is to the tyrant; nay more—the superstitious man is governed by the fanatic, and becomes a fanatic himself. Superstition, born in Paganism, adopted by Judaism, infected the Church in the earliest ages. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it; she excommunicated sorcerers, not as madmen who were in delusion, but as men who really had intercourse with the devils.
At this day, one half of Europe believes that the other half has long been and still is superstitious. The Protestants regard relics, indulgences, macerations, prayers for the dead, holy water, and almost all the rites of the Roman church, as mad superstitions. According to them, superstition consists in mistaking useless practices for necessary ones. Among the Roman Catholics there are some, more enlightened than their forefathers, who have renounced many of these usages formerly sacred; and they defend their adherence to those which they have retained, by saying they are indifferent, and what is indifferent cannot be an evil.
It is difficult to mark the limits of superstition. A Frenchman travelling in Italy thinks almost everything superstitious; nor is he much mistaken. The archbishop of Canterbury asserts that the archbishop of Paris is superstitious; the Presbyterians cast the same reproach upon his grace of Canterbury, and are in their turn called superstitious by the Quakers, who in the eyes of the rest of Christians are the most superstitious of all.
It is then nowhere agreed among Christian societies what superstition is. The sect which appears to be the least violently attacked by this mental disease, is that which has the fewest rites. But if, with but few ceremonies, it is strongly attached to an absurd belief, that absurd belief is of itself equivalent to all the superstitious practices observed from the time of Simon the Magician, down to that of the curate Gaufredi. It is therefore evident that what is the foundation of the religion of one sect, is by another sect regarded as superstitious.
The Mussulmans accuse all Christian societies of it, and are accused of it by them. Who shall decide this great cause? Shall not reason? But each sect declares that reason is on its side. Force then will decide, until reason shall have penetrated into a sufficient number of heads to disarm force.