they are utterly frivolous and groundless." Behold, now, what is confessed by those who defend the gods of the nations.Afterwards he goes on to say that some things belong to superstition, but others to religion, which he thinks good to teach according to the Stoics."For not only the philosophers," he says, "but also our forefathers, have made a distinction between superstition and religion.For those," he says, "who spent whole days in prayer, and offered sacrifice, that their children might outlive them, are called superstitious."(4) Who does not see that he is trying, While he fears the public prejudice, to praise the religion of the ancients, and that he wishes to disjoin it from superstition, but cannot find Out how to do so? For if those who prayed and sacrificed all day were called superstitious by the ancients, were those also called so who instituted (what he blames) the images of the gods of diverse age and distinct clothing, and invented the genealogies of gods, their marriages, and kinships? When, therefore, these things are found fault with as superstitious, he implicates in that fault the ancients who instituted and worshipped such images.Nay, he implicates himself, who, with whatever eloquence he may strive to extricate himself and be free, was yet under the necessity of venerating these images; nor dared he so much as whisper in a discourse to the people What in this disputation he plainly sounds forth.Let us Christians, therefore, give thanks to the Lord our God--not to heaven and earth, as that author argues, but to Him who has made heaven and earth; because these superstitions, which that Balbus, like a babbler,(1) scarcely reprehends, He, by the most deep lowliness of Christ, by the preaching of the apostles, by the faith of the martyrs dying for the truth and living with the truth, has overthrown, not only in the hearts of the religious, but even in the temples of the superstitious, by their own free service.
CHAP.31.--CONCERNING THE OPINIONS OF VARRO, WHO, WHILE REPROBATINGTHE POPULAR
BELIEF, THOUGHT THAT THEIR WORSHIP SHOULD BE CONFINED TO ONE GOD, THOUGHHE WAS
UNABLE TO DISCOVER THE TRUE GOD.
What says Varro himself, whom we grieve to have found, although not by his own judgment, placing the scenic plays among things, divine? When in many passages he is horting, like a religious man, to the worship of the gods, does he not in doing so admit that he does not in his own judgment believe those things which he relates that the Roman state has instituted; so that he does not hesitate to affirm that if he were founding a new state; he could enumerate the gods and their names better by the rule of nature? But being born into a nation already ancient, he says that he finds himself bound to accept the traditional names and surnames of the gods, and the histories connected with them, and that his purpose in investigating and publishing these details is to incline the people to worship the gods, and not to despise them.
By which, words this most acute man sufficiently indicates that he does not publish all things, because they would not only have been contemptible to himself, but would have seemed despicable even to the rabble, unless they had been passed over in silence.I should be thought to conjecture these things, unless he himself, in another passage, had openly said, in speaking of religious rites, that many things are true which it is not only not useful for the common people to know, but that it is expedient that the people should think otherwise, even though falsely, and therefore the Greeks have shut up the religious ceremonies and mysteries in silence, and within walls.In this he no doubt expresses the policy of the so-called wise men by whom states and peoples are ruled.Yet by this crafty device the malign demons are wonderfully delighted, who possess alike the deceivers and the deceived, and from whose tyranny nothing sets free save the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.