THE BELFAST ADDRESS 151 



evil for him who has made up his mind that it is no evil 

 not to live. He adored the gods, but not in the ordinary- 

 fashion. The idea of Divine power, properly purified, he 

 thought an elevating one. Still he taught, "Not he is 

 godless who rejects the gods of the crowd, but rather he 

 who accepts them." The gods were to him eternal and 

 immortal beings, whose blessedness excluded every thought 

 of care or occupation of any kind. Nature pursues her 

 course in accordance with everlasting laws, the gods never 

 interfering. They haunt 



The lacid interspace of world and world 

 Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind, 

 Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, 

 Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, 

 Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 

 ^ Their sacred everlasting calm.^ 



Lange considers the relation of Epicurus to the gods 

 subjective; the indication, probably, of an ethical require- 

 ment of his own nature. We cannot read history with 

 open eyes, or study human nature to its depths, and fail 

 to discern such a requirement. Man never has been, and 

 he never will be, satisfied with the operations and prod- 

 ucts of the Understanding alone; hence physical science 

 cannot cover all the demands of his nature. But the his- 

 tory of the efforts made to satisfy these demands might 

 be broadly described as a history of errors — the error, in 

 great part, consisting in ascribing fixity to that which is 

 fluent, which varies as we vary, being gross when we are 

 gross, and becoming, as our capacities widen, more ab- 

 stract and sublime. On one great point the mind of Epi- 



* Tennj'sons "Lucretius." 



