ned then and said: As to pleasure,
I think there hath been enough said already to evince that, supposing
their doctrine to be successful and to attain its own design, it yet
doth but ease us of fear and a certain superstitious persuasion but
helps us not to any comfort or joy from the gods at all; nay, while it
brings us to such a state as to be neither disquieted nor pleased with
them, it doth but render us in the same manner affected towards them
as we are towards the Scythians or Hyrcanians, from whom we look for
neither good nor harm. But if something more must be added to what hath
been already spoken, I think I may very well take it from themselves.
And in the first place, they quarrel extremely with those that would
take away all sorrowing, weeping, and sighing for the death of friends,
and tell them that such unconcernedness as arrives to an insensibility
proceeds from some other worse cause, to wit, inhumanity, excessive
vainglory, or prodigious fierceness, and that therefore it would be
better to be a little concerned and affected, yea, and to liquor one's
eyes and be melted, with other pretty things of the like kind, which
they use artificially to affect and counterfeit, that they may be
thought tender and loving-hearted people. For just in this manner
Epicurus expressed himself upon the occasion of the death of Hegesianax,
when he wrote to Dositheus the father and to Pyrson the brother of the
deceased person; for I fortuned very lately to run over his epistles.
And I say, in imitation of them, that atheism is no less an evil than
inhumanity and vainglory, and into this they would lead us who take away
with God's anger the comfort we might derive from him. For it would
be much better for us to have something of the unsuiting passion of
dauntedness and fear conjoined and intermixed with our sentiments of
a deity, than while we fly from it, to leave ourselves neither hope,
content, nor assurance in the enjoyment of our good things nor any
recourse to God in our adversity and misfortunes.

We ought, it is true, to remove superstition from the persuasion we
have of the gods, as we would the gum from our eyes; but if that be
impossible, we must not root out and extinguish with it the belief which
the most have of the gods; nor is that a dismaying and sour one either,
as these gentlemen feign, while they libel and abuse the blessed
Providence, representing her as a witch or as some fell and tragic fury.
Yea, I must