Superstition, the worst of all terrors, like all other terrors kills action. It makes no truce with sleep, the refuge from other fears and pains. It invents all kinds of strange practices, immersions in mud, baptisms,[127] prostrations, shameful postures, outlandish worships. He who fears "the gods of his fathers and his race, saviours, friends and givers of good"--whom will he not fear? Superstition adds to the dread of death "the thought of eternal woes." The atheist lays his misfortunes down to accident and looks for remedies. The superstitious makes all into judgments, "the strokes of God," and will have no remedies lest he should seem "to fight against God" (_theomachein_). "Leave me, Sir, to my punishment!" he cries, "me the impious, the accursed, hated of Gods and daemons"--so he sits in rags and rolls in the mud, confessing his sins and iniquities, how he ate or drank or walked when the daemonion forbade. "Wretched man!" he says to himself, "Providence ordains thy suffering; it is God's decree." The atheist thinks there are no gods; the superstitious wishes there were none. It is they who have invented the sacrifices of children that prevailed at Carthage[128] and other things of the kind. If Typhons and Giants were to drive out the gods and become our rulers, what worse could they ask? A hint from the _Conjugal Precepts_ may be added here, as it suggests a difficulty in practice. "The wife ought not to have men friends of her own but to share her husband's; and the gods are our first and best friends. So those gods whom the the husband acknowledges, the wife ought to worship and own, and those alone, and keep the great door shut on superfluous devotions and foreign superstitions. No god really enjoys the {110} stolen rites of a woman in secret."[129] This is a counsel of peace, but if "ugly, ill-tempered and vengeful spirits" seem to the mother to threaten her children, who will decide what are superfluous devotions? The religion of Plutarch is a different thing from his morality. For his ethics rest on an experience much more easy to analyse, and like every elderly and genial person he has much that he can say of the kindly duties of life. Every reader will own the beauty and the high tone of much of his teaching, though some will feel that its centre is the individual, and that it is pleasant rather than compulsive and inevitable. After all nearly every religion has, somewhere or other, what are called "good ethics," but the vital question is, "What else?" In the last resort is ecstasy, independently of morality, the main thing? Are words and acts holy as religious symbols which in a society are obviously vicious? What propellent power lies behind the morals? And where are truth and experience? [Sidenote: Apology or truth?]