Thirdly, to prescribe ceremonies, supplications, sacrifices, and festivals, by which they were to believe, the anger of the gods might be appeased; and that ill success in war, great contagions of sickness, earthquakes, and each man’s private misery, came from the anger of the gods, and their anger from the neglect of their worship, or the forgetting or mistaking some point of the ceremonies required. And though amongst the ancient Romans, men were not forbidden to deny that which in the poets is written of the pains and pleasures after this life: which divers of great authority and gravity in that state have in their harangues openly derided; yet that belief was always more cherished than the contrary.