And again: “Man dieth and wasteth away; man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fall from the sea and the flood dryeth up: so man lieth down and riseth not; till the heavens be no more he shall not awake nor be raised out of his sleep.”... “If a man die, shall he live again?” “Wherefore is light given unto them that are in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul? who long for death, but it cometh not; who rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they can find the grave?” Or Elihu’s interpellation: “Look up to heaven and see the clouds which are higher than thou: If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? If thou be righteous, what givest thou to him, or what can he receive of thine hand?” Could a committee of modern skeptics and philosophers discuss the problems of existence with greater freedom? For a series of centuries the monkish custodians of the literary treasures of Greece and Rome expurgated the writings of the bolder Freethinkers, and for the sake of its mere parchment destroyed more than one work that would have been worth whole libraries of their own lucubrations; yet even the scant relics of pagan literature furnish abundant proofs of the ethical and metaphysical liberty which the philosophers of the Mediterranean nations enjoyed for nearly a thousand years. The marvelous development of Grecian civilization in art, science, politics, literature, and general prosperity coincided with a period of almost unlimited religious freedom. Speculations on the origin of religious myths were propounded with an impunity which our latter-day Freethinkers have still cause to envy. The possibility of all definite knowledge of the attributes of the deity was boldly denied two thousand years before the birth of Emmanuel Kant. The Freethinker Diagoras traveled from city to city, propagating his system of Agnosticism with a publicity which seems to imply a degree of tolerance never yet re-attained in the progress of the most intellectual modern nations. The skeptic Pyrrho ridiculed the absurdity of all our modern Secularists would include under the name of other-worldliness. A Roman actor was applauded with cheers and laughter for quoting a passage to the effect that “if the gods exist, they seem to conduct their administration on the principle of strict neutrality in the affairs of mankind!”