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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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: _The one free gift of gods to mortals, sleep, Why make it for thyself a costly boon?_[269] [Sidenote: C] So we may say to the superstitious man, that the Gods gave sleep for oblivion of troubles and a respite from them; why make it for thyself a cell of punishment, a chamber of abiding torment, whence the miserable soul cannot run away unto any other sleep? Heraclitus[270] says that ‘waking men have one world common to all, but in sleep each betakes him to a world of his own.’ The superstitious has no world, no, not a common world, since neither while he is awake does he enjoy his reason, nor when he sleeps is he set free from his tormentor; reason ever drowses, and fear is ever awake; there is no escape, nor change of place.