l thought and
conscience had cut off the imposed deformities

5 Plutarch, De Superstition. The reality of the popular credulity
and terror in later Rome clearly appears from the fact that Marcus
Aurelius had a law passed condemning to banishment "those who do
any thing through which men's excitable minds are alarmed by a
superstitious fear of the Deity." Nero, after murdering his
mother, haunted by her ghost and tortured by the Furies, attempted
by magical rites to bring up her shade from below, and soften her
vindictive wrath Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. xxxiv.

6 Epigram. XIV.

and dispelled the discoloring vengeance, faith and love would have
been confirmed in contemplating the pure and harmonious form of
doctrine left exposed in the beauty of benignant truth. The aim
ostensibly proposed by Lucretius, in his elaborate and masterly
exposition of the Epicurean philosophy, is to free men from their
absurd belief in childish legends and their painful fears of death
and hell. As far as merely this purpose is concerned, he might
have accomplished it as effectually, perhaps, and more directly,
by exposing the adventitious errors without assailing the great
doctrine around which they had been gathered. Bion the
Borysthenite is reported by Diogenes Laertius to have said, with a
sharp humor, that the souls below would be more punished by
carrying water in whole buckets than in such as had been bored! A
soul may pass into the unseen state though there be no Plutonian
wherry, suffer woe though there be no river Pyriphlegethon, enjoy
bliss though there be no cup of nectar borne by Hebe. But to fly
to rash extremes and build positive conclusions on mere ignorance
has always been natural to man, not only as a believer, but also
as an iconoclastic denier.

A third set of disbelievers in a future life consists of those who
advocate the "emancipation of the flesh" and assert the
sufficiency of this life when fully enjoyed. They attack the dogma
of immortality as the essential germ of asceticism, and abjure it
as a protest against that superstitious distrust and gloom which
put a ban on the pleasures of the world. These are the earthlings
who would fain displace the stern law of self denial with the
bland permission of self indulgence, rehabilitate the senses, feed
every appetite full, and, when satiated of the banquet of
existence, fall asleep under the table of the earth. The
countenance of Duty, severe daughter of God, loo