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To return then to our subject, atheism, which is
a false persuasion that there are no blessed and incorruptible beings, tends yet, by its disbelief of a Divinity, to bring
men to a sort of unconcernedness and indifferency of temper;
for the design of those that deny a God is to ease themselves
of his fear. But superstition appears by its appellation
to be a distempered opinion and conceit, productive of
such mean and abject apprehensions as debase and break
a man's spirit, while he thinks there are divine powers indeed, but withal sour and vindictive ones. So that the
atheist is not at all, and the superstitious is perversely, affected
with the thoughts of God; ignorance depriving the one of
the sense of his goodness, and superadding to the other a
persuasion of his cruelty. Atheism then is but false reasoning single, but superstition is a disorder of the mind produced by this false reasoning.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 1.
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