fate, that he cannot save his own offspring, nor can he bear
their deaths without shedding of tears. These are fine things
indeed! as are the rest that follow. Adulteries truly are so
impudently looked on in heaven by the gods, that some of
them have confessed they envied those that were found in the
very act. And why should they not do so, when the eldest of
them, who is their king also, hath not been able to restrain
himself in the violence of his lust, from lying with his wife,
so
long as they might get into their bedchamber? Now some of
the gods are servants to men, and will sometimes be builders
for a reward, and sometimes will be shepherds; while others
of them, like malefactors, are bound in a prison of brass. And
what sober person is there who would not be provoked at
such stories, and rebuke those that forged them, and
condemn the great silliness of those that admit them for
true? Nay, others there are that have advanced a certain
timorousness and fear, as also madness and fraud, and any
other of the vilest passions, into the nature and form of gods,
and have persuaded whole cities to offer sacrifices to the
better sort of them; on which account they have been
absolutely forced to esteem some gods as the givers of good
things, and to call others of them averters of evil. They also
endeavor to move them, as they would the vilest of men, by
gifts and presents, as looking for nothing else than to receive
some great mischief from them, unless they pay them such
wages.

36. Wherefore it deserves our inquiry what should be the
occasion of this unjust management, and of these scandals