And as Paolo Giovio relates of Mehmed II, who sacked Constantinople, he behaved as one who believed neither in Christ nor in Muhammad. Hence he kept his word and promises only so far as they served his own advantage, and did not scruple to commit any offence to gratify his desires.

I could say the same of many princes and private individuals, in former times and in the present age—our histories are full of them—who love, fear, obey and perform every civic duty only as they find it useful or advantageous to their own ends.

Untroubled by gods, untroubled by human beings, they have no need of prayers, as Tacitus reports of some Germans. They need not pray, fear or hope, for in their own estimation they are safe from both God and other people.

Bolko of Opole, formerly a duke in Silesia, was exactly such a man. He lived, says Aeneas Sylvius, at Wrocław and was so mad to satisfy his lust that he believed in neither heaven nor hell nor the immortality of the soul. He married wives and discarded them as he pleased, committed murder and other crimes, and did whatever he wished.

This duke has all too many followers in our own day. Say what you can, warn, exhort and argue against them: they remain as unmoved—

—— as though they were hard flint or a Marpesian crag,

—as so many logs and stones. Tell them of heaven and hell: it is useless; you are washing a brick. They answer as Atahualpa, that American prince, answered Friar Vincent: when he brought him a book and said it contained all the mysteries of salvation, heaven and hell, the prince looked at it and said he saw nothing of the kind, asking how the friar knew it. They will merely scoff at it or reject it altogether.

Petronius, in Tacitus’s account, when he was bleeding to death at Nero’s command, listened to his friends speaking neither of the soul’s immortality nor of the philosophers’ doctrines, but reciting light poems and easy verses. Instead of sound counsel and divine meditations, he had his friends sing him bawdy verses and coarse songs.

Let whoever wants them have heaven, paradise and that future happiness: it is good to be here—it is good being here. There is no talking to such people, no hope of their conversion. Their understanding is corrupt; they are mere carnalists, bodily-minded people. However a few flatterers may applaud them in this life and consider them worldly-wise, they seem to me, says Melanchthon, as mad as Hercules when he raved and killed his wife and children.

There is a milder kind of these atheistical spirits who profess religion, but timidly and hesitantly. They are tempted into this by the disturbing thought of the diversity of religions that exist and have existed in the world—an argument Campanella both presents and answers in chapter 9 of Atheism Conquered—and also by the greed, imposture and dishonesty of priests, which, as Postel observes, make them put less faith in sacred things.

Some of those religions are so fanciful and extravagant, yet defended so fiercely with equal firmness and certainty, that they infer: if there are so many religious sects, each denied by the others, why may they not all be false? Why should one or another be preferred to the rest? The Sceptics press this argument; among others, Sextus Empiricus reaches this conclusion in book 8 of Against the Mathematicians.

After many philosophical arguments and reasons for and against the existence of gods, he concludes: since so many contend with one another, and so on, only one can be true, as Cicero likewise argues. Christians say that they alone worship the true God; they pity all other sects and lament their condition.

Yet those ancient Greeks and Romans who worshipped the Devil, as the Chinese do now, or local gods—their own gods—were much nobler, more high-spirited and victorious, with a more flourishing commonwealth, better cities, soldiers, scholars and minds: so Julian the Apostate, Caecilius in Minucius, Celsus and the philosopher Porphyry object, and Machiavelli maintains. Their gods often overcame our gods and performed as many miracles, and so on.

Saint Cyril, Arnobius, Minucius and many other ancient writers defend Christianity well, as more recently do Lessius, Duplessis-Mornay, Grotius in On the Truth of the Christian Religion, and Savonarola in On the Truth of the Christian Faith. Zanchi, Campanella, Marin Mersenne, Bozio and Gentillet answer all these atheistical arguments at length. But another difficulty troubles many people, as it did in ancient times: wicked people generally prosper; professed atheists prosper.

There are no gods, and heaven is empty, Selius declares; his proof is that he sees himself Made prosperous while denying these things.

There are no gods; the heavens are a fiction, Selius publicly maintains; For while he thus denies their divinity, He prospers all the more.

This is a principal argument: for the most part, the sincerest, most upright, honest and good people are brought low. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong (Ecclesiastes 9:11), nor bread to the wise, nor favour or riches to people of understanding; time and chance come to all.

There was a great plague at Athens, as Thucydides relates in book 2, during which everyone eventually acted with great licence, doing as he pleased without regard for divine or human laws. Neither fear of God nor human laws, he says, restrained anyone, because the plague carried off good and bad alike. They therefore concluded that worshipping or not worshipping the gods made no difference, since all perished alike.

Some raise objections and doubts about Scripture itself: it cannot accord with God’s mercy that so many should be damned, so many be bad and so few good; that there should be such contention over religions, all obstinate in their own cause, equally factional, equally prosperous, yet bitterly persecuting and condemning one another to damnation.