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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.
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