Of Superstition, or Indiscreet Devotion (7-8)

Consider well the atheist, and observe his behavior first in things not under the disposal of his will. If he be otherwise a man of good temper, he is silent under his present circumstances, and is providing himself with either remedies or palliatives for his misfortunes. But if he be a

fretful and impatient man, his whole complaint is against Fortune. He cries out, that nothing is managed here below either after the rules of a strict justice or the orderly course of a providence, and that all human affairs are hurried and driven without either premeditation or distinction. This is not the demeanor of the superstitious; if the least thing do but happen amiss to him, he sits him down plunged in sorrow, and raises himself a vast tempest of intolerable and incurable passions, and presents his fancy with nothing but terrors, fears, surmises, and distractions, until he hath overwhelmed himself with groans and fears. He blames neither man, nor Fortune, nor the times, nor himself; but charges all upon God, from whom he fancies a whole deluge of vengeance to be pouring down upon him; and, as if he were not only unfortunate but in open hostility with Heaven, he imagines that he is punished by God and is now making satisfaction for his past crimes, and saith that his sufferings are all just and owing to himself. Again, when the atheist falls sick, he reckons up and calls to his remembrance his several surfeits and debauches, his irregular course of living, excessive labors, or unaccustomed changes of air or climate. Likewise, when he miscarries in any public administration, and either falls into popular disgrace or comes to be ill presented to his prince, he searches for the causes in himself and those about him, and asks,

Where have I erred? What have I done amiss?

What should be done by me that undone is?

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But the fanciful superstitionist accounts every little distemper in his body or decay in his estate, the death of his children, and crosses and disappointments in matters relating to the public, as the immediate strokes of God and the incursions of some vindictive daemon. And therefore he dares not attempt to remove or relieve his disasters, or to use the least remedy or to oppose himself to them, for fear he should seem to struggle with God and to make resistance under correction. If he be sick, he thrusts away the physician; if he be in any grief, he shuts out the philosopher that would comfort and advise him. Let me alone, saith he, to pay for my sins: I am a cursed and vile offender, and detestable both to God and angels. Now suppose a man unpersuaded of a Divinity in never so great sorrow and trouble, you may yet possibly wipe away his tears, cut his hair, and force away his mourning; but how will you come at this superstitious penitentiary, either to speak to him or to bring him any relief? He sits him down without doors in sackcloth, or wrapped up in foul and nasty rags; yea, many times rolls himself naked in mire, repeating over I know not what sins and transgressions of his own; as, how he did eat this thing and drink the other thing, or went some way prohibited by his Genius. But suppose he be now at his best, and laboring under only a mild attack of superstition; you shall even then find him sitting down in the midst of his house all becharmed and bespelled, with a parcel of old women about him, tugging all they can light on, and hanging it upon him as (to use an expression of Bion’s) upon some nail or peg.

It is reported of Teribazus that, being seized by the Persians, he drew out his scimitar, and being a very stout person, defended himself bravely; but when they cried out and told him he was apprehended by the king’s order, he immediately put up his sword, and presented his hands to be bound. Is not this the very case of the superstitious? Others can oppose their misfortunes, repel their troubles, and furnish themselves with retreats, or means of avoiding the stroke of things not under the disposal of their wills; but the superstitious person, without anybody’s speaking to him,—but merely upon his own saying to himself, This thou undergoest, vile wretch, by the direction of Providence,

and by Heaven’s just appointment,—immediately casts away all hope, surrenders himself up, and shuns and affronts his friends that would relieve him. Thus do these sottish fears oftentimes convert tolerable evils into fatal and insupportable ones. The ancient Midas (as the story goes of him), being much troubled and disquieted by certain dreams, grew so melancholy thereupon, that he made himself away by drinking bull’s blood. Aristodemus, king of Messenia, when a war broke out betwixt the Lacedaemonians and the Messenians, upon some dogs howling like wolves, and grass coming up about his ancestors’ domestic altar, and his divines presaging ill upon it, fell into such a fit of sullenness and despair that he slew himself. And perhaps it had been better if the Athenian general, Nicias, had been eased of his folly the same way that Midas and Aristodemus were, than for him to sit still for fear of a lunar eclipse, while he was invested by an enemy, and so be himself made a prisoner, together with an army of forty thousand men (that were all either slain or taken), and die ingloriously. There was nothing formidable in the interposition of the earth betwixt the sun and the moon, neither was there any thing dreadful in the shadow’s meeting the moon at the proper time: no, the dreadfulness lay here, that the darkness of ignorance should blind and befool a man’s reason at a time when he had most occasion to use it.

Glaucus, behold!

The sea with billows deep begins to roll;

The seas begin in azure rods to lie;

A teeming cloud of pitch hangs on the sky

Right o’er Gyre rocks; there is a tempest nigh;

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which as soon as the pilot sees, he falls to his prayers and invokes his tutelar daemons, but neglects not in the mean time to hold to the rudder and let down the mainyard; and so,

By gathering in his sails, with mighty pain,

Escapes the hell-pits of the raging main.

Hesiod[*] directs his husbandman, before he either plough or sow, to pray to the infernal Jove and the venerable Ceres, but with his hand upon the plough-tail. Homer acquaints us how Ajax, being to engage in a single combat with Hector, bade the Grecians pray to the Gods for him; and while they were at their devotions, he was putting on his armor. Likewise, after Agamemnon had thus prepared his soldiers for the fight,—

Each make his spear to glitter as the sun,

Each see his warlike target well hung on,—

he then prayed,—

Grant me, great Jove, to throw down Priam’s roof.

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For God is the brave man’s hope, and not the coward’s excuse. The Jews indeed once sat on their tails,—it being forsooth their Sabbath day,—and suffered their enemies to rear their scaling-ladders and make themselves masters of their walls, and so lay still until they were caught like so many trout in the drag-net of their own superstition.[*]