Of Superstition, or Indiscreet Devotion (1-5)

Our great ignorance of the Divine Beings most naturally runs in two streams; whereof the one in harsh and coarse tempers, as in dry and stubborn soils, produces atheism, and the other in the more tender and flexible, as in moist and yielding grounds, produces superstition. Indeed, every wrong judgment, in matters of this nature especially, is a great unhappiness to us; but it is here attended with a passion, or disorder of the mind, of a worse consequence than itself. For every such passion is, as it were, an error inflamed. And as a dislocation is the more painful when it is attended with a bruise, so are the perversions of our understandings, when attended with passion. Is a man of opinion that atoms and a void were the first origins of things? It is indeed a mistaken conceit, but makes no ulcer, no shooting, no searching pain. But is a man of opinion that wealth is his last good? This error contains in it a canker; it preys upon a man’s spirits, it transports him, it suffers him not to sleep, it makes him horn-mad, it carries him over headlong precipices, strangles him, and makes him unable to speak his mind. Are there some again, that take virtue and vice for substantial bodies? This may be sottish conceit indeed, but yet it bespeaks neither lamentations nor groans. But such opinions and conceits as these,—

Poor virtue! thou wast but a name, and mere jest,

And I, choust fool, did practise thee in earnest,

To return then to our subject, atheism, which is a false persuasion that there are no blessed and incorruptible beings, tends yet, by its disbelief of a Divinity, to bring men to a sort of unconcernedness and indifferency of temper; for the design of those that deny a God is to ease themselves of his fear. But superstition appears by its appellation to be a distempered opinion and conceit, productive of such mean and abject apprehensions as debase and break a man’s spirit, while he thinks there are divine powers indeed, but withal sour and vindictive ones. So that the atheist is not at all, and the superstitious is perversely, affected with the thoughts of God; ignorance depriving the one of the sense of his goodness, and superadding to the other a persuasion of his cruelty. Atheism then is but false reasoning single, but superstition is a disorder of the mind produced by this false reasoning.

Every distemper of our minds is truly base and ignoble; yet some passions are accompanied with a sort of levity, that makes men appear gay, prompt, and erect; but none, we may say, are wholly destitute of force for action. But the common charge upon all sorts of passions is, that they excite and urge the reason, forcing it by their violent stings. Fear alone, being equally destitute of reason and audacity, renders our whole irrational part stupid, distracted, and unserviceable. Therefore it is called δεῖμα because it binds, and τάρβος because it distracts the mind.[*] But of all fears, none so dozes and confounds as that of superstition. He fears not the sea that never goes to sea; nor a battle, that

Dear sleep, sweet easer of my irksome grief,

Pleasant thou art! how welcome thy relief!

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If in a dream hobgoblin thou hast seen,

Or felt’st the rambling guards o’ th’ Fairy Queen,

O that our Greeks should found such barbarous rites,

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Polycrates was formidable at Samos, and so was Periander at Corinth; but no man ever feared either of them that had made his escape to an equal and free government. But he that dreads the divine government, as a sort of inexorable and implacable tyranny, whither

Both man and wife in direful slavery,

And with ill masters too! Fate’s worst decree!

Atheism is attended with none of this. True indeed, the ignorance is very lamentable and sad. For to be blind or to see amiss in matters of this consequence cannot but be a fatal unhappiness to the mind, it being then deprived of the fairest and brightest of its many eyes, the knowledge of God. Yet this opinion (as hath been said) is not necessarily accompanied with any disordering, ulcerous, frightful, or slavish passion. Plato thinks the Gods never gave men music, the science of melody and harmony, for mere delectation or to tickle the ear, but in order that the confusion and disorder in the periods and harmonies of the soul, which often for want of the Muses and of grace break forth into extravagance through intemperance and license, might be sweetly recalled, and artfully wound up to their former consent and agreement.

No animal accurst by Jove

Music’s sweet charms can ever love,

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