1. Our great ignorance of the Divine Beings most naturally runs in two
streams; whereof the one in harsh and coarse tempers, as in dry and
stubborn soils, produces atheism, and the other in the more tender and
flexible, as in moist and yielding grounds, produces superstition.
Indeed, every wrong judgment, in matters of this nature especially, is
a great unhappiness to us; but it is here attended with a passion, or
disorder of the mind, of a worse consequence than itself. For every
such passion is, as it were, an error inflamed. And as a dislocation
is the more painful when it is attended with a bruise, so are the
perversions of our understandings, when attended with passion. Is a
man of opinion that atoms and a void were the first origins of things?
It is indeed a mistaken conceit, but makes no ulcer, no shooting, no
searching pain. But is a man of opinion that wealth is his last good?
This error contains in it a canker; it preys upon a man’s spirits, it
transports him, it suffers him not to sleep, it makes him horn-mad,
it carries him over headlong precipices, strangles him, and makes him
unable to speak his mind. Are there some again, that take virtue and
vice for substantial bodies? This may be sottish conceit indeed, but
yet it bespeaks neither lamentations nor groans. But such opinions and
conceits as these,—
Poor virtue! thou wast but a name, and mere jest,
And I, choust fool, did practise thee in earnest,
and for thee have I quitted injustice, the way to wealth, and excess,
the parent of all true pleasure,—these are the thoughts that call at
once for our pity and indignation; for they will engender swarms of
diseases, like fly-blows and vermin, in our minds.
2. To return then to our subject, atheism, which is a false persuasion
that there are no blessed and incorruptible beings, tends yet, by its
disbelief of a Divinity, to bring men to a sort of unconcernedness
and indifferency of temper; for the design of those that deny a God
is to ease themselves of his fear. But superstition appears by its
appellation to be a distempered opinion and conceit, productive
of such mean and abject apprehensions as debase and break a man’s
spirit, while he thinks there are divine powers indeed, but withal
sour and vindictive ones. So that the atheist is not at all, and
the superstitious is perversely, affected with the thoughts of
God; ignorance depriving the one of the sense of his goodness, and
superadding to the other a persuasion of his cruelty. Atheism then is
but false reasoning single, but superstition is a disorder of the mind
produced by this false reasoning.
3. Every distemper of our minds is truly base and ignoble; yet some
passions are accompanied with a sort of levity, that makes men appear
gay, prompt, and erect; but none, we may say, are wholly destitute of
force for action. But the common charge upon all sorts of passions
is, that they excite and urge the reason, forcing it by their
violent stings. Fear alone, being equally destitute of reason and
audacity, renders our whole irrational part stupid, distracted, and
unserviceable. Therefore it is called δεῖμα because it _binds_, and
τάρβος because it _distracts_ the mind.[95] But of all fears, none
so dozes and confounds as that of superstition. He fears not the sea
that never goes to sea; nor a battle, that follows not the camp; nor
robbers, that stirs not abroad; nor malicious informers, that is a poor
man; nor emulation, that leads a private life; nor earthquakes, that
dwells in Gaul; nor thunderbolts, that dwells in Ethiopia: but he that
dreads divine powers dreads every thing, the land, the sea, the air,
the sky, the dark, the light, a sound, a silence, a dream. Even slaves
forget their masters in their sleep; sleep lightens the irons of the
fettered; their angry sores, mortified gangrenes, and pinching pains
allow them some intermission at night.
Dear sleep, sweet easer of my irksome grief,
Pleasant thou art! how welcome thy relief![96]
Superstition will not permit a man to say this. That alone will give
no truce at night, nor suffer the poor soul so much as to breathe or
look up, or respite her sour and dismal thoughts of God a moment;
but raises in the sleep of the superstitious, as in the place of the
damned, certain prodigious forms and ghastly spectres, and perpetually
tortures the unhappy soul, chasing her out of sleep into dreams,
lashed and tormented by her own self, as by some other, and charged by
herself with dire and portentous injunctions. Neither have they, when
awake, enough sense to slight and smile at all this, or to be pleased
with the thought that nothing of all that terrified them was real; but
they still fear an empty shadow, that could never mean them any ill,
and cheat themselves afresh at noonday, and keep a bustle, and are at
expense upon the next fortune-teller or vagrant that shall but tell
them:—
If in a dream hobgoblin thou hast seen,
Or felt’st the rambling guards o’ th’ Fairy Queen,
send for some old witch who can purify thee, go dip thyself in the sea,
and then sit down upon the bare ground the rest of the day.