Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ... THE EIGHTH BOOK i i ... CHAPTER I The scope of the afore-passed disputation, and what is remaining to treat of. In these controversies of the gods, some have held How can deities of both natures, good and evil: others (of better minds) did the gods that honour to hold them all good. But those that held the first, held the airy spirits to be gods also, and called them gods, as they called the gods, spirits, but not so ordinarily. Indeed they confess that Jove, the prince of all the rest, was by Homer called a damon. But such as affirmed all the gods were good ones, and far better than the best men, are justly moved by the arts of the airy spirits, to hold firmly that the gods could do no such matters, and therefore of force there must be a difference between them and these spirits: and that what ever displeasant affect, or bad act they see caused, wherein these spirits do show their secret power, that they hold is the devil's work, and not the gods'. But yet because they place these spirits as mediators between their gods and men (as if God and man had no other means of commerce), to carry and recarry prayers and benefits from the one to the other, this being the opinion of the most excellent philosophers the Platonists, with whom I choose to discuss this question, whether the adoration of many gods be helpful to eternal felicity? In the last book we disputed VOL. II 8i F Of these how the devils (delighting in that which all wise and air-spirits honest men abhor, as in the foul, enormous, irreligious fictions of tne gods' crimes (not men's), and in the damnable practice of magic), can be so much nearer to the gods; that men must make them the means to attain their favours: and we found it utterly impossible. So now this...