Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/399

Rh deeds that we have. Now if these think that bondage is a great calamity, saying thus:

how much more grievous, think you, is their servitude which they endure who cannot fly, who cannot run away and escape, who cannot change and turn to another. Altars there be unto which bad servants may fly for succour; many sanctuaries there be and privileged churches for thieves and robbers, from whence no man is so hardy as to pluck and pull them out. Enemies, after they are defeated and put to flight, if in the very rout and chase they can take hold of some image of the gods, or recover some temple and get it over their heads once, are secured and assured of their lives; whereas the superstitious person is most affrighted, scared and put in fear by that wherein all others who be afraid of extremest evils that can happen to man repose their hope and trust. Never go about to pull perforce a superstitious man out of sacred temples, for in them he is most afflicted and tormented.

What needs many words? In all men death is the end of life; but it is not so in superstition, for it extendeth and reacheth farther than the limits and utmost bounds thereof, making fear longer than this life, and adjoining unto death an imagination of immortal miseries; and even then, when there seemeth to be an end and cessation of all sorrows and travails, be superstitious men persuaded that they must enter into others which be endless and everlasting: they dream of (I wot not what) deep gates of a certain Pluto, or infernal god of hell, which open for to receive them; of fiery rivers always burning; of hollow gulfs and floods of Styx to gape for them; of ugly and hideous darkness to overspread them, full of sundry apparitions; of ghastly ghosts and sorrowful spirits, representing unto them grizzly and horrible shapes to see, and as fearful and lamentable voices to hear: what should I speak of judges, of tormentors, of bottomless pits and gaping caves, full of all sorts of torture and infinite miseries. Thus unhappy and wretched superstition, by fearing overmuch and without reason that which it imagineth to be nought, never taketh heed how it submitteth itself to all miseries; and for want of knowledge how to avoid this passionate trouble, occasioned by the fear of the gods, forgeth and