us 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 superstitions,
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, "superstition 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 AEthiopia; but
he who fears the gods 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. Superstition 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.'"

Here we have a vivid picture of Plutarch's idea of the essence of
superstition; it was the imagination of the existence of an unseen
ever-present Master; the bondage of a rule of life, of a continual
responsibility; obligation to attend to little things, the impossibility
of escaping from duty, the inability to choose or change one's religion,
an interference with the enjoyment of life, a melancholy view of the
world, sense of sin, horror at guilt, apprehension of punishment, dread,
self-abasement, depression, anxiety, and endeavor to be at peace with
heaven, and error and absurdity in the methods chosen for the purpose.
Such, too, had been the idea of the Epicurean Velleius, when he shrunk
with horror from the "_sempiternus dominus_" and "_curiosus Deus_" of
the Stoics. Such, surely, was the meaning of Tacitus, Suetonius, and
Pliny. And hence, of course, the freque