An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Part 18

2.

In these testimonies, which will form a natural and convenient text for what is to follow, we have various characteristics brought before us of the religion to which they relate. It was a superst.i.tion, as all three writers agree; a bad and excessive superst.i.tion, according to Pliny; a magical superst.i.tion, according to Suetonius; a deadly superst.i.tion, according to Tacitus. Next, it was embodied in a society, and moreover a secret and unlawful society or _hetaeria_; and it was a proselytizing society; and its very name was connected with "flagitious," "atrocious,"

and "shocking" acts.

3.

Now these few points, which are not all which might be set down, contain in themselves a distinct and significant description of Christianity; but they have far greater meaning when ill.u.s.trated by the history of the times, the testimony of later writers, and the acts of the Roman government towards its professors. It is impossible to mistake the judgment pa.s.sed on the religion by these three writers, and still more clearly by other writers and Imperial functionaries. They evidently a.s.sociated Christianity with the oriental superst.i.tions, whether propagated by individuals or embodied in a rite, which were in that day traversing the Empire, and which in the event acted so remarkable a part in breaking up the national forms of wors.h.i.+p, and so in preparing the way for Christianity. This, then, is the broad view which the educated heathen took of Christianity; and, if it had been very unlike those rites and curious arts in external appearance, they would not have confused it with them.

Changes in society are, by a providential appointment, commonly preceded and facilitated by the setting in of a certain current in men's thoughts and feelings in that direction towards which a change is to be made.

And, as lighter substances whirl about before the tempest and presage it, so words and deeds, ominous but not effective of the coming revolution, are circulated beforehand through the mult.i.tude, or pa.s.s across the field of events. This was specially the case with Christianity, as became its high dignity; it came heralded and attended by a crowd of shadows, shadows of itself, impotent and monstrous as shadows are, but not at first sight distinguishable from it by common spectators. Before the mission of the Apostles, a movement, of which there had been earlier parallels, had begun in Egypt, Syria, and the neighbouring countries, tending to the propagation of new and peculiar forms of wors.h.i.+p throughout the Empire. Prophecies were afloat that some new order of things was coming in from the East, which increased the existing unsettlement of the popular mind; pretenders made attempts to satisfy its wants, and old Traditions of the Truth, embodied for ages in local or in national religions, gave to these attempts a doctrinal and ritual shape, which became an additional point of resemblance to that Truth which was soon visibly to appear.

4.

The distinctive character of the rites in question lay in their appealing to the gloomy rather than to the cheerful and hopeful feelings, and in their influencing the mind through fear. The notions of guilt and expiation, of evil and good to come, and of dealings with the invisible world, were in some shape or other pre-eminent in them, and formed a striking contrast to the cla.s.sical polytheism, which was gay and graceful, as was natural in a civilized age. The new rites, on the other hand, were secret; their doctrine was mysterious; their profession was a discipline, beginning in a formal initiation, manifested in an a.s.sociation, and exercised in privation and pain. They were from the nature of the case proselytizing societies, for they were rising into power; nor were they local, but vagrant, restless, intrusive, and encroaching. Their pretensions to supernatural knowledge brought them into easy connexion with magic and astrology, which are as attractive to the wealthy and luxurious as the more vulgar superst.i.tions to the populace.

5.

Such were the rites of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras; such the Chaldeans, as they were commonly called, and the Magi; they came from one part of the world, and during the first and second century spread with busy perseverance to the northern and western extremities of the empire.[213:1] Traces of the mysteries of Cybele, a Syrian deity, if the famous temple at Hierapolis was hers, have been found in Spain, in Gaul, and in Britain, as high up as the wall of Severus. The wors.h.i.+p of Isis was the most widely spread of all the pagan deities; it was received in Ethiopia and in Germany, and even the name of Paris has been fancifully traced to it. Both wors.h.i.+ps, as well as the Science of Magic, had their colleges of priests and devotees, which were governed by a president, and in some places were supported by farms. Their processions pa.s.sed from town to town, begging as they went and attracting proselytes.

Apuleius describes one of them as seizing a whip, accusing himself of some offence, and scourging himself in public. These strollers, _circulatores_ or _agyrtae_ in cla.s.sical language, told fortunes, and distributed prophetical tickets to the ignorant people who consulted them. Also, they were learned in the doctrine of omens, of lucky and unlucky days, of the rites of expiation and of sacrifices. Such an _agyrtes_ or itinerant was the notorious Alexander of Abonotichus, till he managed to establish himself in Pontus, where he carried on so successful an imposition that his fame reached Rome, and men in office and station entrusted him with their dearest political secrets. Such a wanderer, with a far more religious bearing and a high reputation for virtue, was Apollonius of Tyana, who professed the Pythagorean philosophy, claimed the gift of miracles, and roamed about preaching, teaching, healing, and prophesying from India and Alexandria to Athens and Rome. Another solitary proselytizer, though of an earlier time and of an avowed profligacy, had been the Sacrificulus, viewed with such horror by the Roman Senate, as introducing the infamous Bacchic rites into Rome. Such, again, were those degenerate children of a divine religion, who, in the words of their Creator and Judge, "compa.s.sed sea and land to make one proselyte," and made him "twofold more the child of h.e.l.l than themselves."

6.

These vagrant religionists for the most part professed a severe rule of life, and sometimes one of fanatical mortification. In the mysteries of Mithras, the initiation[214:1] was preceded by fasting and abstinence, and a variety of painful trials; it was made by means of a baptism as a spiritual was.h.i.+ng; and it included an offering of bread, and some emblem of a resurrection. In the Samothracian rites it had been a custom to initiate children; confession too of greater crimes seems to have been required, and would naturally be involved in others in the inquisition prosecuted into the past lives of the candidates for initiation. The garments of the converts were white; their calling was considered as a warfare (_militia_), and was undertaken with a _sacramentum_, or military oath. The priests shaved their heads and wore linen, and when they were dead were buried in a sacerdotal garment. It is scarcely necessary to refer to the mutilation inflicted on the priests of Cybele; one instance of their scourgings has been already mentioned; and Tertullian speaks of their high priest cutting his arms for the life of the Emperor Marcus.[215:1] The priests of Isis, in lamentation for Osiris, tore their b.r.e.a.s.t.s with pine cones. This lamentation was a ritual observance, founded on some religious mystery: Isis lost Osiris, and the initiated wept in memory of her sorrow; the Syrian G.o.ddess had wept over dead Thammuz, and her mystics commemorated it by a ceremonial woe; in the rites of Bacchus, an image was laid on a bier at midnight,[215:2] which was bewailed in metrical hymns; the G.o.d was supposed to die, and then to revive. Nor was this the only wors.h.i.+p which was continued through the night; while some of the rites were performed in caves.

7.

Only a heavenly light can give purity to nocturnal and subterraneous wors.h.i.+p. Caves were at that time appropriated to the wors.h.i.+p of the infernal G.o.ds. It was but natural that these wild religions should be connected with magic and its kindred arts; magic has at all times led to cruelty, and licentiousness would be the inevitable reaction from a temporary strictness. An extraordinary profession, when men are in a state of mere nature, makes hypocrites or madmen, and will in no long time be discarded except by the few. The world of that day a.s.sociated together in one company, Isiac, Phrygian, Mithriac, Chaldean, wizard, astrologer, fortune-teller, itinerant, and, as was not unnatural, Jew.

Magic was professed by the profligate Alexander, and was imputed to the grave Apollonius. The rites of Mithras came from the Magi of Persia; and it is obviously difficult to distinguish in principle the ceremonies of the Syrian Taurobolium from those of the Necyomantia in the Odyssey, or of Canidia in Horace.

The Theodosian Code calls magic generally a "superst.i.tion;" and magic, orgies, mysteries, and "sabbathizings," were referred to the same "barbarous" origin. "Magical superst.i.tions," the "rites of the Magi,"

the "promises of the Chaldeans," and the "Mathematici," are familiar to the readers of Tacitus. The Emperor Otho, an avowed patron of oriental fas.h.i.+ons, took part in the rites of Isis, and consulted the Mathematici.

Vespasian, who also consulted them, is heard of in Egypt as performing miracles at the suggestion of Serapis. Tiberius, in an edict, cla.s.ses together "Egyptian and Jewish rites;" and Tacitus and Suetonius, in recording it, speak of the two religions together as "_ea superst.i.tio_."[216:1] Augustus had already a.s.sociated them together as superst.i.tions, and as unlawful, and that in contrast to others of a like foreign origin. "As to foreign rites (_peregrinae ceremoniae_)," says Suetonius, "as he paid more reverence to those which were old and enjoined, so did he hold the rest in contempt."[216:2] He goes on to say that, even on the judgment-seat, he had recognized the Eleusinian priests, into whose mysteries he had been initiated at Athens; "whereas, when travelling in Egypt, he had refused to see Apis, and had approved of his grandson Caligula's pa.s.sing by Judaea without sacrificing at Jerusalem." Plutarch speaks of magic as connected with the mournful mysteries of Orpheus and Zoroaster, with the Egyptian and the Phrygian; and, in his Treatise on Superst.i.tion, he puts together in one clause, as specimens of that disease of mind, "covering oneself with mud, wallowing in the mire, sabbathizings, fallings on the face, unseemly postures, foreign adorations,"[216:3] Ovid mentions in consecutive verses the rites of "Adonis lamented by Venus," "The Sabbath of the Syrian Jew,"

and the "Memphitic Temple of Io in her linen dress."[216:4] Juvenal speaks of the rites, as well as the language and the music, of the Syrian Orontes having flooded Rome; and, in his description of the superst.i.tion of the Roman women, he places the low Jewish fortune-teller between the pompous priests of Cybele and Isis, and the b.l.o.o.d.y witchcraft of the Armenian haruspex and the astrology of the Chaldeans.[217:1]

8.

The Christian, being at first accounted a kind of Jew, was even on that score included in whatever odium, and whatever bad a.s.sociations, attended on the Jewish name. But in a little time his independence of the rejected people was clearly understood, as even the persecutions show; and he stood upon his own ground. Still his character did not change in the eyes of the world; for favour or for reproach, he was still a.s.sociated with the votaries of secret and magical rites. The Emperor Hadrian, noted as he is for his inquisitive temper, and a partaker in so many mysteries,[217:2] still believed that the Christians of Egypt allowed themselves in the wors.h.i.+p of Serapis. They are brought into connexion with the magic of Egypt in the history of what is commonly called the Thundering Legion, so far as this, that the rain which relieved the Emperor's army in the field, and which the Church ascribed to the prayers of the Christian soldiers, is by Dio Ca.s.sius attributed to an Egyptian magician, who obtained it by invoking Mercury and other spirits. This war had been the occasion of one of the first recognitions which the state had conceded to the Oriental rites, though statesmen and emperors, as private men, had long taken part in them. The Emperor Marcus had been urged by his fears of the Marcomanni to resort to these foreign introductions, and is said to have employed Magi and Chaldeans in averting an unsuccessful issue of the war. It is observable that, in the growing countenance which was extended to these rites in the third century, Christianity came in for a share. The chapel of Alexander Severus contained statues of Abraham, Orpheus, Apollonius, Pythagoras, and our Lord. Here indeed, as in the case of Zen.o.bia's Judaism, an eclectic philosophy aided the comprehension of religions.

But, immediately before Alexander, Heliogabalus, who was no philosopher, while he formally seated his Syrian idol in the Palatine, while he observed the mysteries of Cybele and Adonis, and celebrated his magic rites with human victims, intended also, according to Lampridius, to unite with his horrible superst.i.tion "the Jewish and Samaritan religions and the Christian rite, that so the priesthood of Heliogabalus might comprise the mystery of every wors.h.i.+p."[218:1] Hence, more or less, the stories which occur in ecclesiastical history of the conversion or good-will of the emperors to the Christian faith, of Hadrian, Mammaea, and others, besides Heliogabalus and Alexander. Such stories might often mean little more than that they favoured it among other forms of Oriental superst.i.tion.

9.

What has been said is sufficient to bring before the mind an historical fact, which indeed does not need evidence. Upon the established religions of Europe the East had renewed her encroachments, and was pouring forth a family of rites which in various ways attracted the attention of the luxurious, the political, the ignorant, the restless, and the remorseful. Armenian, Chaldee, Egyptian, Jew, Syrian, Phrygian, as the case might be, was the designation of the new hierophant; and magic, superst.i.tion, barbarism, jugglery, were the names given to his rite by the world. In this company appeared Christianity. When then three well-informed writers call Christianity a superst.i.tion and a magical superst.i.tion, they were not using words at random, or the language of abuse, but they were describing it in distinct and recognized terms as cognate to those gloomy, secret, odious, disreputable religions which were making so much disturbance up and down the empire.

10.

The impression made on the world by circ.u.mstances immediately before the rise of Christianity received a sort of confirmation upon its rise, in the appearance of the Gnostic and kindred heresies, which issued from the Church during the second and third centuries. Their resemblance in ritual and const.i.tution to the Oriental religions, sometimes their historical relations.h.i.+p, is undeniable; and certainly it is a singular coincidence, that Christianity should be first called a magical superst.i.tion by Suetonius, and then should be found in the intimate company, and seemingly the parent, of a mult.i.tude of magical superst.i.tions, if there was nothing in the Religion itself to give rise to such a charge.

11.

The Gnostic family[219:1] suitably traces its origin to a mixed race, which had commenced its national history by a.s.sociating Orientalism with Revelation. After the captivity of the ten tribes, Samaria was colonized by "men from Babylon and Cushan, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim," who were instructed at their own instance in "the manner of the G.o.d of the land," by one of the priests of the Church of Jeroboam.

The consequence was, that "they feared the Lord and served their own G.o.ds." Of this country was Simon, the reputed patriarch of the Gnostics; and he is introduced in the Acts of the Apostles as professing those magical powers which were so princ.i.p.al a characteristic of the Oriental mysteries. His heresy, though broken into a mult.i.tude of sects, was poured over the world with a Catholicity not inferior in its day to that of Christianity. St. Peter, who fell in with him originally in Samaria, seems to have encountered him again at Rome. At Rome, St.

Polycarp met Marcion of Pontus, whose followers spread through Italy, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Persia; Valentinus preached his doctrines in Alexandria, Rome, and Cyprus; and we read of his disciples in Crete, Caesarea, Antioch, and other parts of the East. Bardesanes and his followers were found in Mesopotamia. The Carpocratians are spoken of at Alexandria, at Rome, and in Cephallenia; the Basilidians spread through the greater part of Egypt; the Ophites were apparently in Bithynia and Galatia; the Cainites or Caians in Africa, and the Marcosians in Gaul.

To these must be added several sects, which, though not strictly of the Gnostic stock, are a.s.sociated with them in date, character, and origin;--the Ebionites of Palestine, the Cerinthians, who rose in some part of Asia Minor, the Encrat.i.tes and kindred sects, who spread from Mesopotamia to Syria, to Cilicia and other provinces of Asia Minor, and thence to Rome, Gaul, Aquitaine, and Spain; and the Montanists, who, with a town in Phrygia for their metropolis, reached at length from Constantinople to Carthage.

"When [the reader of Christian history] comes to the second century,"

says Dr. Burton, "he finds that Gnosticism, under some form or other, was professed in every part of the then civilized world. He finds it divided into schools, as numerously and as zealously attended as any which Greece or Asia could boast in their happiest days. He meets with names totally unknown to him before, which excited as much sensation as those of Aristotle or Plato. He hears of volumes having been written in support of this new philosophy, not one of which has survived to our own day."[221:1] Many of the founders of these sects had been Christians; others were of Jewish parentage; others were more or less connected in fact with the Pagan rites to which their own bore so great a resemblance. Monta.n.u.s seems even to have been a mutilated priest of Cybele; the followers of Prodicus professed to possess the secret books of Zoroaster; and the doctrine of dualism, which so many of the sects held, is to be traced to the same source. Basilides seems to have recognized Mithras as the Supreme Being, or the Prince of Angels, or the Sun, if Mithras is equivalent to Abraxas, which was inscribed upon his amulets: on the other hand, he is said to have been taught by an immediate disciple of St. Peter, and Valentinus by an immediate disciple of St. Paul. Marcion was the son of a Bishop of Pontus; Tatian, a disciple of St. Justin Martyr.

12.

Whatever might be the history of these sects, and though it may be a question whether they can be properly called "superst.i.tions," and though many of them numbered educated men among their teachers and followers, they closely resembled, at least in ritual and profession, the vagrant Pagan mysteries which have been above described. Their very name of "Gnostic" implied the possession of a secret, which was to be communicated to their disciples. Ceremonial observances were the preparation, and symbolical rites the instrument, of initiation. Tatian and Monta.n.u.s, the representatives of very distinct schools, agreed in making asceticism a rule of life. The followers of each of these sectaries abstained from wine; the Tatianites and Marcionites, from flesh; the Montanists kept three Lents in the year. All the Gnostic sects seem to have condemned marriage on one or other reason.[222:1] The Marcionites had three baptisms or more; the Marcosians had two rites of what they called redemption; the latter of these was celebrated as a marriage, and the room adorned as a marriage-chamber. A consecration to a priesthood then followed with anointing. An extreme unction was another of their rites, and prayers for the dead one of their observances. Bardesanes and Harmonius were famous for the beauty of their chants. The prophecies of Monta.n.u.s were delivered, like the oracles of the heathen, in a state of enthusiasm or ecstasy. To Epiphanes, the son of Carpocrates, who died at the age of seventeen, a temple was erected in the island of Cephallenia, his mother's birthplace, where he was celebrated with hymns and sacrifices. A similar honour was paid by the Carpocratians to Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, as well as to the Apostles; crowns were placed upon their images, and incense burned before them. In one of the inscriptions found at Cyrene, about twenty years since, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicurus, and others, are put together with our Lord, as guides of conduct. These inscriptions also contain the Carpocratian tenet of a community of women. I am unwilling to allude to the Agapae and Communions of certain of these sects, which were not surpa.s.sed in profligacy by the Pagan rites of which they were an imitation. The very name of Gnostic became an expression for the worst impurities, and no one dared eat bread with them, or use their culinary instruments or plates.

13.

These profligate excesses are found in connexion with the exercise of magic and astrology.[223:1] The amulets of the Basilidians are still extant in great numbers, inscribed with symbols, some Christian, some with figures of Isis, Serapis, and Anubis, represented according to the gross indecencies of the Egyptian mythology.[223:2] St. Irenaeus had already connected together the two crimes in speaking of the Simonians: "Their mystical priests," he says, "live in lewdness, and practise magic, according to the ability of each. They use exorcisms and incantations; love-potions too, and seductive spells; the virtue of spirits, and dreams, and all other curious arts, they diligently observe."[223:3] The Marcosians were especially devoted to these "curious arts," which are also ascribed to Carpocrates and Apelles.

Marcion and others are reported to have used astrology. Tertullian speaks generally of the sects of his day: "Infamous are the dealings of the heretics with sorcerers very many, with mountebanks, with astrologers, with philosophers, to wit, such as are given to curious questions. They everywhere remember, 'Seek, and ye shall find.'"[223:4]

Such were the Gnostics; and to external and prejudiced spectators, whether philosophers, as Celsus and Porphyry, or the mult.i.tude, they wore an appearance sufficiently like the Church to be mistaken for her in the latter part of the Ante-nicene period, as she was confused with the Pagan mysteries in the earlier.

14.

Of course it may happen that the common estimate concerning a person or a body is purely accidental and unfounded; but in such cases it is not lasting. Such were the calumnies of child-eating and impurity in the Christian meetings, which were almost extinct by the time of Origen, and which might arise from the world's confusing them with the pagan and heretical rites. But when it continues from age to age, it is certainly an index of a fact, and corresponds to definite qualities in the object to which it relates. In that case, even mistakes carry information; for they are cognate to the truth, and we can allow for them. Often what seems like a mistake is merely the mode in which the informant conveys his testimony, or the impression which a fact makes on him. Censure is the natural tone of one man in a case where praise is the natural tone of another; the very same character or action inspires one mind with enthusiasm, and another with contempt. What to one man is magnanimity, to another is romance, and pride to a third, and pretence to a fourth, while to a fifth it is simply unintelligible; and yet there is a certain a.n.a.logy in their separate testimonies, which conveys to us what the thing is like and what it is not like. When a man's acknowledged note is superst.i.tion, we may be pretty sure we shall not find him an Academic or an Epicurean; and even words which are ambiguous, as "atheist," or "reformer," admit of a sure interpretation when we are informed of the speaker. In like manner, there is a certain general correspondence between magic and miracle, obstinacy and faith, insubordination and zeal for religion, sophistry and argumentative talent, craft and meekness, as is obvious. Let us proceed then in our contemplation of this reflection, as it may be called of primitive Christianity in the mirror of the world.

15.

All three writers, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, call it a "superst.i.tion;" this is no accidental imputation, but is repeated by a variety of subsequent writers and speakers. The charge of Thyestean banquets scarcely lasts a hundred years; but, while pagan witnesses are to be found, the Church is accused of superst.i.tion. The heathen disputant in Minucius calls Christianity, "_Vana et demens superst.i.tio_." The lawyer Modestinus speaks, with an apparent allusion to Christianity, of "weak minds being terrified _superst.i.tione numinis_." The heathen magistrate asks St. Marcellus, whether he and others have put away "vain superst.i.tions," and wors.h.i.+p the G.o.ds whom the emperors wors.h.i.+p. The Pagans in Arn.o.bius speak of Christianity as "an execrable and unlucky religion, full of impiety and sacrilege, contaminating the rites inst.i.tuted from of old with the superst.i.tion of its novelty." The anonymous opponent of Lactantius calls it, "_Impia et anilis superst.i.tio_." Diocletian's inscription at Clunia was, as it declared, on occasion of "the total extinction of the superst.i.tion of the Christians, and the extension of the wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ds." Maximin, in his Letter upon Constantine's Edict, still calls it a superst.i.tion.[225:1]

16.

Now what is meant by the word thus attached by a _consensus_ of heathen authorities to Christianity? At least, it cannot mean a religion in which a man might think what he pleased, and was set free from all yokes, whether of ignorance, fear, authority, or priestcraft. When heathen writers call the Oriental rites superst.i.tions, they evidently use the word in its modern sense; it cannot surely be doubted that they apply it in the same sense to Christianity. But Plutarch explains for us the word at length, in his Treatise which bears the name: "Of all kinds of fear," he says, "superst.i.tion is the most fatal to action and resource. He does not fear the sea who does not sail, nor war who does not serve, nor robbers who keeps at home, nor the sycophant who is poor, nor the envious if he is a private man, nor an earthquake if he lives in Gaul, nor thunder if he lives in Ethiopia; but he who fears the G.o.ds fears everything, earth, seas, air, sky, darkness, light, noises, silence, sleep. Slaves sleep and forget their masters; of the fettered doth sleep lighten the chain; inflamed wounds, ulcers cruel and agonizing, are not felt by the sleeping. Superst.i.tion alone has come to no terms with sleep; but in the very sleep of her victims, as though they were in the realms of the impious, she raises horrible spectres, and monstrous phantoms, and various pains, and whirls the miserable soul about, and persecutes it. They rise, and, instead of making light of what is unreal, they fall into the hands of quacks and conjurers, who say, 'Call the crone to expiate, bathe in the sea, and sit all day on the ground.'" He goes on to speak of the introduction of "uncouth names and barbarous terms" into "the divine and national authority of religion;" observes that, whereas slaves, when they despair of freedom, may demand to be sold to another master, superst.i.tion admits of no change of G.o.ds, since "the G.o.d cannot be found whom he will not fear, who fears the G.o.ds of his family and his birth, who shudders at the Saving and the Benignant, who has a trembling and dread at those from whom we ask riches and wealth, concord, peace, success of all good words and deeds." He says, moreover, that, while death is to all men an end of life, it is not so to the superst.i.tious; for then "there are deep gates of h.e.l.l to yawn, and headlong streams of at once fire and gloom are opened, and darkness with its many phantoms encompa.s.ses, ghosts presenting horrid visages and wretched voices, and judges and executioners, and chasms and dens full of innumerable miseries."

Presently, he says, that in misfortune or sickness the superst.i.tious man refuses to see physician or philosopher, and cries, "Suffer me, O man, to undergo punishment, the impious, the cursed, the hated of G.o.ds and spirits. The Atheist," with whom all along he is contrasting the superst.i.tious disadvantageously, "wipes his tears, trims his hair, doffs his mourning; but how can you address, how help the superst.i.tious? He sits apart in sackcloth or filthy rags; and often he strips himself and rolls in the mud, and tells out his sins and offences, as having eaten and drunken something, or walked some way which the divinity did not allow. . . . And in his best mood, and under the influence of a good-humoured superst.i.tion, he sits at home, with sacrifice and slaughter all round him, while the old crones hang on him as on a peg, as Bion says, any charm they fall in with." He continues, "What men like best are festivals, banquets at the temples, initiations, orgies, votive prayers, and adorations. But the superst.i.tious wishes indeed, but is unable to rejoice. He is crowned and turns pale; he sacrifices and is in fear; he prays with a quivering voice, and burns incense with trembling hands, and altogether belies the saying of Pythagoras, that we are then in best case when we go to the G.o.ds; for superst.i.tious men are in most wretched and evil case, approaching the houses or shrines of the G.o.ds as if they were the dens of bears, or the holes of snakes, or the caves of whales."

17.