attain its own design, it yet doth but ease us of fear and a
certain superstitious persuasion but helps us not to any comfort or
joy from the gods at all; nay, while it brings us to such a state
as to be neither disquieted nor pleased with them, it doth but
render us in the same manner affected towards them as we are
towards the Scythians or Hyrcanians, from whom we look for neither
good nor harm. But if something more must be added to what hath
been already spoken, I think I may very well take it from
themselves. And in the first place, they quarrel extremely with
those that would take away all sorrowing, weeping, and sighing for
the death of friends, and tell them that such unconcernedness as
arrives to an insensibility proceeds from some other worse cause,
to wit, inhumanity, excessive vainglory, or prodigious fierceness,
and that therefore it would be better to be a little concerned and
affected, yea, and to liquor one's eyes and be melted, with other
pretty things of the like kind, which they use artificially to
affect and counterfeit, that they may be thought tender and
loving-hearted people. For just in this manner Epicurus expressed
himself upon the occasion of the death of Hegesianax, when he wrote
to Dositheus the father and to Pyrson the brother of the deceased
person; for I fortuned very lately to run over his epistles. And I
say, in imitation of them, that atheism is no less an evil than
inhumanity and vainglory, and into this they would lead us who take
away with God's anger the comfort we might derive from him. For it
would be much better for us to have something of the unsuiting
passion of dauntedness and fear conjoined and intermixed with our
sentiments of a deity, than while we fly from it, to leave
ourselves neither hope, content, nor assurance in the enjoyment of
our good things nor any recourse to God in our adversity
and misfortunes.