“The profoundest, the most essential and paramount theme of human interest,” says Goethe, “is the eternal conflict between Atheism and Superstition.”[330] Plutarch’s tract, “De Superstitione,” is a classical sermon on this text, although in his presentment of the subject the mutual antagonism of the two principles receives less emphasis than the hostility which both alike direct against the interests of true Religion. He has no sympathy with any notion similar to that current since his days, in many religious minds, that Superstition is but a mistaken form of Piety, deserving tenderness rather than reprehension, and he maintains that absolute disbelief in God is less mischievous in its effects upon human conduct and character than its opposite extreme of superstitious devotion. With this hint of Plutarch’s point of view we proceed to a brief analysis of the tract in which his view is mainly expounded. At the very commencement he describes the two evils as springing from an identical source. Ignorance of the Divine Nature has a twofold aspect: in people of stern dispositions it appears as Atheism; in minds of more yielding and submissive mould it shows itself as Superstition. Merely intellectual errors, such as the Epicurean Theory of Atoms and the Void, or the Stoic notion that virtue and vice are corporeal substances, are unaccompanied by any passionate mental disturbance: they are silly blunders, but not worth tears. But is a man convinced that wealth is the highest good? or does he regard virtue as a mere empty name?—these are errors that cannot be distinguished from moral disorders. Atheism is an intellectual error: Superstition a moral disorder—an intellectual error “touched with emotion.”[331] The moral disorder of Superstition is depicted in a few paragraphs of striking power, opulent with historical and literary allusion. The effect of the description is to leave a conviction of the utter inability of the superstitious man to free any portion of his life from the influence of his awful fear of the gods. “He does not dread the sea who never sails; nor he a war who never goes to camp; nor he a robber who keeps his home; nor he an informer who has no wealth; nor he envy who lives retired; nor he an earthquake who dwells in Gaul; nor he a thunderbolt who inhabits Æthiopia. But they who fear the gods fear all things—land, sea, air, sky, darkness, light, sound, silence, dream.[332] By day as well as night they live in prey to dreadful dreams, and fall a ready victim to the first fortune-telling cheat they come upon. They dip themselves in the sea: they pass all day in a sitting posture: they roll themselves on dunghills: cover themselves with mud: keep Sabbaths:[333] cast themselves on their faces: stand in strange attitudes, and adopt strange methods of adoration.—Those who thought it important to maintain the recognized laws of Music, used to instruct their pupils to ‘sing with a just mouth’; and we maintain that