The means, as I say, are rewards, promises, terrors, alarms and punishments—in a word, fair means and foul, hope and fear. How often have Jupiter, Apollo, Bacchus and the rest sent plagues into Greece and Italy because their sacrifices were neglected?

Neglected, the gods have brought many woes Upon grieving Italy.

They did so to terrify them, to rouse them and the like. Just read Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Thucydides, Pausanias, Philostratus and Polybius: before the battle of Cannae, all the temples, and even private houses, swarmed with prodigies, signs and portents. Oeneus ruled in Aetolia; because he did not sacrifice to Diana along with his other gods—see more in Libanius’s Diana—she sent a wild boar of extraordinary size, which dreadfully ravaged both lands and people, to destroy people and country alike. Meleager afterwards killed it.

So Plutarch, in his Life of Lucullus, relates how Mithridates, king of Pontus, was defeated with his entire navy at the siege of Cyzicus by Proserpina for neglecting her holy day. She appeared to Aristagoras in a vision at night: Tomorrow, she said, I shall pit the Libyan flute-player against the Pontic flute-player. The following day the riddle became clear: with a great south wind from Libya she completely overwhelmed Mithridates’ army.

What prodigies and miracles, dreams, visions, predictions, apparitions and oracles there were in ancient times at Delphi, Dodona, Trophonius’s cave, Thebes and Lebadea, at the oracle of Jupiter Ammon in Egypt, and that of Amphiaraus in Attica, and elsewhere! What strange cures Apollo and Aesculapius performed! The images of Juno and Fortune spoke; Castor and Pollux fought in person for the Romans against Hannibal’s army, as Pallas, Mars, Juno and Venus did for the Greeks and Trojans, and so on.

Among our false Catholics, nothing is more familiar than such miracles. How many cures Our Lady of Loreto has performed, and how many at Sichem, or formerly at our Saint Thomas’s shrine! Saint Sabinus was seen fighting for Arnulf, duke of Spoleto; Saint George fought in person for John, the bastard of Portugal, against the Castilians; and Saint James for the Spaniards in America.

At the battle of Bannockburn, where our English king Edward II was defeated by the Scots, Saint Fillan’s arm, previously shut inside a silver casket, was seen fighting—if Hector Boece is not deceiving us. On another occasion, according to the same author, Saint Magnus fought for them.

As for visions, revelations and miracles, we hear of them not only in the legends of saints and in reports from purgatory: news comes every day from the Indies and here at home. Read the Jesuits’ letters, Ribadeneira, Tursellinus, Acosta, Lippomanus, the lives of Xavier and Ignatius, and the rest, and tell me what difference there is.

The ordinary instruments or agents he employs to spread his superstition—just as God himself employed good kings, lawful magistrates, patriarchs and prophets to establish his Church—are politicians, statesmen, priests, heretics, blind guides, impostors and false prophets. To begin with politicians: it has always been a chief maxim of theirs to maintain religion or superstition, deciding upon it, altering it and varying it whenever they think best. They make religion mere political expediency, a cloak, a human invention: nothing is so effective in governing the minds of the crowd as superstition, as Tacitus and Cicero hold.

Augustine, in The City of God, book 4, chapter 27, censures Scaevola for saying and acknowledging that it is expedient for communities to be deceived by religion: that it was fitting for cities to be deceived through religion. As the proverb says, if the world wishes to be deceived, let it be deceived; if the world wants to be fooled, let it be fooled—it is good, at any rate, to keep it in subjection. This is what Aristotle and Plato impress upon us in their political writings: neglected religion brings plagues upon the city and opens the way to every kind of wickedness.

This is what all our recent political writers repeat: Kromer, History of Poland, book 2; Botero, On the Growth of Cities, book 3; Clapmar, On the Secrets of States, book 2, chapter 9; and Arnisaeus, Politics, book 2, chapter 4. Captain Machiavelli insists that a prince must by every means counterfeit religion, be superstitious at least in appearance, seem devout, attend religious exercises, honour theologians, love the Church and favour priests, as Numa, Lycurgus and such lawgivers were and did: not to believe these things themselves, but to keep their subjects more easily at their duty through religious fear—to keep the people obedient.

For by its nature, as Cardano writes, the Christian law is a law of piety, justice, fidelity, simplicity, and so on. But this error of Machiavelli’s has been amply refuted by the French lawyer Innocent Gentillet, theorem 9, commentary 1, On Religion, and by Tommaso Bozio in his book On the Ruin of Nations and Kingdoms.

I cannot deny that many politicians uphold religion as a genuine means, speak sincerely of it without hypocrisy, and are themselves truly zealous and religious. Justice and religion are the two chief pillars supporting a well-governed state.

but most of them are merely Machiavellians, pretending only for political ends. For the king alone, as Campanella observes in chapter 18 of Atheism Defeated, and as among the Turks of our own day, is the purpose of the state. They know how great religion’s power over people’s minds is, and that, as Sabellicus says, a man without religion is like a horse without a bridle.