SUBSECTION 5 The Cure of Religious Melancholy

To purge the world of idolatry and superstition will require some monster-taming Hercules, a divine Asclepius, or Christ himself to come in person and reign on earth for a thousand years before the end, as the millenarians would have him do.

People are generally so resistant, so confident in their own opinions, so obstinate and firmly attached to the religion in which they were raised, that no persuasion, terror or persecution can turn them from it. This consideration has induced many states to allow them freedom of conscience as they themselves choose.

Jews are tolerated in most provinces of Europe; in Asia they have their synagogues. The Spaniards allow Moors to live among them; the Mughals allow non-Muslims; the Turks allow all religions. In Europe, Poland and Amsterdam are the common places of refuge.

Some believe that no one ought to be coerced in matters of conscience: whatever religion a person follows, he may be saved, just as Cornelius was accepted in former times—Jew, Turk, Anabaptist or anyone else—provided he is honest, lives soberly and peaceably in his professed faith, and serves his own God with due fear and reverence. Volkel, Crell and the other Socinians now settled around Kraków and Raków in Poland have revived this opinion.

Let every city, Laelius, have its own religion, and let us have ours. Cicero thought that every city should be free in this respect to worship its own protective and local gods—its tutelary and local gods, as Symmachus calls them.

Isocrates advises Demonicus that, when he comes to a foreign city, he should by all means worship the gods of the place, and that each local god ought to be worshipped in the way that he himself has commanded. Caecilius in Minucius presses this point, wishing every nation to retain its ancestral religious rites and worship its local gods—to keep its own ceremonies and worship its particular gods.

Pomponius Mela reports this of the Africans: They worship their own gods according to ancestral custom—they worship their own gods according to their own prescribed practice. For why, as the speaker argues there, should any one nation claim this universality for its God, as Christians do: their God, whom they neither show nor see, supposedly moving about and present everywhere, investigating everyone’s conduct, actions and secret thoughts, and so on?

Let every province enjoy its liberty in this matter, worshipping one god or all, as it chooses and is taught. The Romans built altars to the gods of Asia, Europe and Libya, to unknown and foreign gods; others did otherwise, and so on. Pliny the Younger, as his letter to Trajan shows, would not have had Christians persecuted so harshly.

And at one point in Maximinus’s reign, as Eusebius records in his Church History, book 9, chapter 9, a decree was made to this effect: No one shall be compelled against his will to adopt this or that worship of the gods. Constantine likewise decreed in the nineteenth year of his reign, as Baronius tells us: Let no one trouble another; let each person do what his own soul desires.

New gods, new lawgivers and new priests will have new ceremonies, customs and religions, to which every prudent person, as a good conformist, should adapt himself.

Saturn has perished, and his laws have perished too; The world is now under Jove: obey Jove’s commands.

That same emperor Constantine, as Eusebius writes, threw down and destroyed all the pagan gods, statues of silver and gold, altars, images and temples, and converted them all into Christian churches: hostile to pagan monuments, he exposed them to ridicule. The Turk now converts them in turn into Muslim mosques. A similar edict appeared in the reign of Arcadius and Honorius.

The orator Symmachus, seeking general toleration in his time, used this argument: Since God is immense and infinite, and his nature cannot be perfectly known, it is fitting that he should be worshipped in as many different ways as people perceive or understand him.

He thought it impossible for one religion to be universal. You see that one small province can scarcely be governed by a single civil or spiritual law; how, then, can so many separate and vast empires of the world be united into one? It never has happened, and never will.

Besides, if there are infinitely many planetary and stellar worlds, as some maintain, there are infinitely many guardian or ruling spirits belonging to each of them; and consequently, since they will all be worshipped, infinitely many religions. Let every territory therefore retain its own rites and ceremonies as its tutelary gods—as Maximus of Tyre calls them—wish, and according to the region they govern: its own institutions, revelations, ordinances and oracles, which these gods dictate from time to time or teach their priests or ministers.

This doctrine was stoutly maintained in Turkey not long ago, as you may read in Busbecq’s third letter: everyone who lived a holy and innocent life should share in eternal happiness, whatever religion they professed. Rüstem Pasha was a strong supporter of it, although Muhammad himself was sent by the power of the sword to compel everyone to follow him, as he writes in his Quran.

Others approve of this for Jews, pagans and unbelievers outside the fold. They are willing to show them every consideration and favour, but by no means to those within the bounds of our own Church who are called Christians—to heretics, schismatics or the like. Let the Spanish Inquisition, that fourth Fury, speak for some of them, along with the civil wars and massacres in France and our own Marian times.