In the meantime they promised little towards a moral regeneration of society. They offered men and women emotions, but they scarcely touched morality. To the terrors of life, already many enough, they added crowning fears, and cramped and dwarfed the minds of men. {25} [Sidenote: Lucretius] "O hapless race of men!" cried Lucretius, "when they attributed such deeds to the gods and added cruel anger thereto! what groanings did they then beget for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for our children's children! No act of piety is it to be often seen with veiled head turning toward a stone, to haunt every altar, to lie prostrate on the ground with hands outspread before the shrines of gods, to sprinkle the altars with much blood of beasts and link vow to vow--no! rather to be able to look on all things with a mind at peace."[88] And a mind at peace was the last thing that contemporary religion could offer to any one. "Human life," he says, "lay visibly before men's eyes foully crushed to earth under the weight of Religion, who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect lowering upon men," till Epicurus "dared first to uplift mortal eyes against her face and first to withstand her.... The living force of his soul gained the day; on he passed far beyond the flaming walls of the world and traversed in mind and spirit the immeasurable universe. And thence he returns again a conqueror, to tell us what can and what cannot come into being; in short on what principle each thing has its powers defined, its deep-set boundary mark. So Religion is put under our feet and trampled upon in its turn; while as for us, his victory sets us on a level with heaven."[89] It was the establishment of law which brought peace to Lucretius. In the ease of mind which we see he gained from the contemplation of the fixity of cause and effect, in the enthusiasm with which he emphasizes such words as _rationes_, _faedera_, _leges_, with which he celebrates _Natura gubernans_, we can read the horrible weight upon a feeling soul of a world distracted by the incalculable caprices of a myriad of divine or daemonic beings.[90] The force with which he flings himself against the doctrine of a future life shows that it is a fight for freedom. If men would rid themselves of "the dread of something after death"--and they could if they would, for reason will do it--they could live in "the serene temples of the wise"; the gods would pass from their minds; bereavement would lose its sting, and life would no longer be brutalized by the cruelties of terror. Avarice, treachery, murder, civil war, suicide--all these things are the fruit of this fear of death.[91] {26}