those who approach the gods should address them with a just mouth and a righteous, lest, in our anxiety to have the tongue of the victim pure and free from fault, we twist and defile our own with strange barbarian names and expressions, and thus disgrace the dignified piety of our national Faith.”[334] Not only is this life full of torture to the Superstitious, but their terrified imagination leaps the limits of the Afterworld, and adds to death the conception of deathless woes. Hell-gate yawns for them; streams of flame and Stygian cataracts threaten them; the gloom is horrid with spectral shapes, and piteous sights and sounds, with judges and executioners, and chasms crowded with a myriad woes. The condition of the Atheist is far to be preferred. It was better for Tiresias to be blind than it was for Athamas and Agave to see their children in the shape of lions and stags. The Atheist does not see God at all: the superstitious man sees Him terrible instead of benign, a tyrant instead of a father, harsh instead of tender. The troubles of actual life are assigned by the Atheist to natural causes, to defects in himself or his circumstances; and he endeavours to mitigate or remove them by greater care. But to the victim of Superstition his bodily ailments, his pecuniary misfortunes, his children’s deaths, his public failures, are the strokes of a god or the attacks of a dæmon, and cannot therefore be remedied by natural means, which would have the appearance of opposition to the will of God.[335] Hence light misfortunes are often allowed to become fatal disasters.[336] Thus, Midas was frightened to death by his dreams; Aristodemus of Messene committed suicide because the soothsayers had alarmed him about a trifling omen;[337] Nicias lost his life and his great army because he was afraid when a shadow crept over the moon. Let us pray to the gods, but let us not neglect reasonable human endeavour. “While the Greeks were praying for Ajax, Ajax was putting on his armour; for God is the hope of bravery, not the pretext for cowardice.”[338] Participation in religious ceremonies, which should be the most cheerful and happy act of life, is an additional cause of dread to the Superstitious, whose case is worse than that of the Atheist who smiles sarcastically at the whole business. The Atheist, true, is guilty of impiety: but is not Superstition more open to this charge? “I, for my part, would greatly prefer that men should say about me that there was not, and never had been, such a man as Plutarch, than that they should say that Plutarch is a fickle, irascible, vindictive fellow, who will pay you out for not inviting him to supper, or for omitting to call upon him, or for passing him in the street without speaking to him, by committing a violent assault upon you, giving one of your children a thorough caning, or turning a beast into your cornfield.”[339] The fact of the matter is, that the Atheist believes there are no gods, while the