nature be eternal; that
if fire wants sustenance, it will cease to be, and that, therefore,
fire is not of its own nature eternal.

XV. After all, what kind of a Deity must that be who is not graced with
one single virtue, if we should succeed in forming this idea of such a
one? Must we not attribute prudence to a Deity? a virtue which consists
in the knowledge of things good, bad, and indifferent. Yet what need
has a being for the discernment of good and ill who neither has nor can
have any ill? Of what use is reason to him? of what use is
understanding? We men, indeed, find them useful to aid us in finding
out things which are obscure by those which are clear to us; but
nothing can be obscure to a Deity. As to justice, which gives to every
one his own, it is not the concern of the Gods; since that virtue,
according to your doctrine, received its birth from men and from civil
society. Temperance consists in abstinence from corporeal pleasures,
and if such abstinence hath a place in heaven, so also must the
pleasures abstained from. Lastly, if fortitude is ascribed to the
Deity, how does it appear? In afflictions, in labor, in danger? None of
these things can affect a God. How, then, can we conceive this to be a
Deity that makes no use of reason, and is not endowed with any virtue?

However, when I consider what is advanced by the Stoics, my contempt
for the ignorant multitude vanishes. For these are their divinities.
The Syrians worshipped a fish. The Egyptians consecrated beasts of
almost every kind. The Greeks deified many men; as Alabandus[249] at
Alabandae, Tenes at Tenedos; and all Greece pay divine honors to
Leucothea (who was before called Ino), to her son Palaemon, to Hercules,
to AEsculapius, and to the Tyndaridae; our own people to Romulus, and to
many others, who, as citizens newly admitted into the ancient body,
they imagine have been received into heaven.

These are the Gods of the illiterate.

XVI. What are the notions of you philosophers? In what respect are they
superior to these ideas? I shall pass them over; for they are certainly
very admirable. Let the world, then, be a Deity, for that, I conceive,
is what you mean by

The refulgent heaven above,
Which all men call, unanimously, Jove.

But why are we to add many more Gods? What a multitude of them there
is! At least, it seems so to me; for every constellation, according to
you, is a Deity: to some you give the name of beast