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OF UNITY IN RELIGION
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conspiracies and rebellions; to put the sword into the people's hands; and the like; tending to the subversion of all government, which is the ordinance of God. For this is but to dash the first table against the second;[1] and so to consider men as Christians, as we forget that they are men. Lucretius the poet, when he beheld the act of Agamemnon,[2] that could endure the sacrificing of his own daughter, exclaimed:
Tantum Relligio potuit suadere malorum:[3]
What would he have said, if he had known of the massacre in France,[4] or the powder treason[5] of England? He would have been seven times more Epicure[6] and atheist than he was. For as the temporal sword is to be drawn with great circumspection in
- ↑ "And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and broke them beneath the mount." Exodus xxxii. 19.
- ↑ Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks before Troy, made a vow to Artemis that he would offer up to her the dearest possession that came to him within the next twelvemonth. This happened to be a child, his daughter, Iphigeneia. When, some years later the Trojan fleet was wind-bound at Aulis, Calchas, the priest, said it was on account of the wrath of the goddess because Agamemnon had not kept his vow. Iphigeneia was thereupon bound to the altar to be sacrificed, but Artemis substituted a hind in her stead and carried off the maiden to Tauris to become her priestess. Note the likeness of the story to that of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, Genesis xxii. 1-19; and to Jephthah's vow, Judges xi. 30–40.
Iphigeneia's story was treated by Euripides, in his tragedy, Iphigeneia in Tauris, and by Goethe, in Iphigenie auf Tauris. - ↑ To ills so dire could religion prompt. T. Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura. Liber I. 101.
- ↑ The massacre of the Huguenots in France on St. Bartholomew's day, August 24, 1572, by the order of Charles IX. and his mother, Catharine de' Medici.
- ↑ The Gunpowder Plot, of Guy Fawkes (1570–1606) and other conspirators, who proposed to blow up the House of Lords at the opening of Parliament, Nov. 5, 1605, when the King, the royal family, and the House of Commons would be present.
- ↑ Epicure. Epicurean.
