But among the Gentiles various sects had no restraint; the Skeptics doubted of everything; the Academics suspended their judgment on everything; the Epicureans were persuaded that the Divinity could not meddle in human affairs, and in their hearts admitted no Divinity. They were convinced that the soul is not a substance, but a faculty which is born and perishes with the body; consequently, they had no restraint but that of morality and honor. The Roman senators and knights were in reality atheists; for to men who neither feared nor hoped anything from them, the gods could not exist. The Roman senate, then, in the time of Cæsar and Cicero, was in fact an assembly of atheists. That great orator, in his oration for Cluentius, says to the whole assembled senate: "What does he lose by death? We reject all the silly fables about the infernal regions. What, then, can death take from him? Nothing but the susceptibility of sorrow." Does not Cæsar, wishing to save the life of his friend Catiline, threatened by the same Cicero, object that to put a criminal to death is not to punish him--that death is nothing--that it is but the termination of our ills--a moment rather fortunate than calamitous? Did not Cicero and the whole senate yield to this reasoning? The conquerors and legislators of all the known world then, evidently, formed a society of men who feared nothing from the gods, but were real atheists. Bayle next examines whether idolatry is more dangerous than atheism--whether it is a greater crime not to believe in the Divinity than to have unworthy notions of it; in this he thinks with Plutarch--that it is better to have no opinion than a bad opinion; but, without offence to Plutarch, it was infinitely better that the Greeks should fear Ceres, Neptune, and Jupiter than that they should fear nothing at all. It is clear that the sanctity of oaths is necessary; and that those are more to be trusted who think a false oath will be punished, than those who think they may take a false oath with impunity. It cannot be doubted that, in an organized society, it is better to have even a bad religion than no religion at all.