be laid to their charge, meant to do men a mischief._
It is alleged, in excuse of this practice, that the stories told
of the gods are not true, but false, and mere inventions; but this
only makes matters worse, if we form our estimate by the morality
our religion teaches; and if we consider the malice of the devils,
what more wily and astute artifice could they practise upon men?
When a slander is uttered against a leading statesman of upright and
useful life, is it not reprehensible in proportion to its untruth
and groundlessness? What punishment, then, shall be sufficient when
the gods are the objects of so wicked and outrageous an injustice?
But the devils, whom these men repute gods, are content that even
iniquities they are guiltless of should be ascribed to them, so long
as they may entangle men's minds in the meshes of these opinions, and
draw them on along with themselves to their predestinated punishment:
whether such things were actually committed by the men whom these
devils, delighting in human infatuation, cause to be worshipped as
gods, and in whose stead they, by a thousand malign and deceitful
artifices, substitute themselves, and so receive worship; or whether,
though they were really the crimes of men, these wicked spirits
gladly allowed them to be attributed to higher beings, that there
might seem to be conveyed from heaven itself a sufficient sanction
for the perpetration of shameful wickedness. The Greeks, therefore,
seeing the character of the gods they served, thought that the poets
should certainly not refrain from showing up human vices on the
stage, either because they desired to be like their gods in this, or
because they were afraid that, if they required for themselves a more
unblemished reputation than they asserted for the gods, they might
provoke them to anger.