Many of our own indiscreet pastors are not far behind. In their ordinary sermons they dwell on election, predestination, reprobation from eternity, the withdrawal of grace, being passed over, deliberate divine permission and so on; on the signs by which people should examine and test themselves to discover whether they are God’s true, elect children, whether they are reprobate or predestined, and so on.

Through these scrupulous questions they continually magnify sin and thunder out God’s judgements without discrimination. They rail at people at ill-chosen times and pronounce them damned before every congregation for devoting so much time to sports and innocent recreation. Making every small fault, and every morally indifferent matter, an unforgivable offence, they rend, tear and wound people’s consciences until they are almost mad and at their wits’ end.

These bitter potions, says Erasmus, are always in their mouths: nothing but gall, horror and a frenzied clamour. They drive all their hearers to despair.

Many are wounded in this way, commonly those who are most devout and strict in religious observance, who were formerly presumptuous and certain of their salvation. Those with sensitive consciences, who attend sermons and frequent religious lectures, and who in fact have least cause for alarm, are most liable to misunderstand and fall into these miseries.

I have heard some complain that Parsons’s Resolution and other books of that kind, otherwise good, are too grim: they cast people down too much and magnify their offences. Great care in selection, and much discretion, are needed in such matters.

The last and greatest cause of this affliction is our own conscience: awareness of our sins and of God’s justly deserved anger, a guilty conscience over some grave offence committed in the past,

—— Poor Orestes, what sickness is destroying you? Orestes: Conscience, for I know the wrongs I have committed.

A good conscience is a continual feast, but a wounded conscience is as great a torment as one can suffer: an oven that never stops baking, as Pierius compares it in his Hieroglyphics—another hell.

Our conscience is a great ledger in which all our offences are written, a register preserving them. The Egyptians represented it in their hieroglyphics by a mill, both for its ceaseless working and for its torment. It grinds our souls with the memory of past sins, making us turn upon ourselves, accuse ourselves and condemn ourselves. Sin lies at the door, and so on.

I know that Zanchi, Musculus and the others assign many further causes: doubt, unbelief, presumption, ignorance, blindness, ingratitude, discontent, and those five great miseries in Aristotle—disgrace, poverty, sickness, enmity and death—and so on. But this cause, conscience, is the greatest, like an ulcer continually afflicting the body:

this scrupulous conscience, as Pieter van Foreest calls it, which tortures so many. From a deep sense of their unworthiness or reflection on their own dissolute lives, they accuse themselves and magnify every small offence, even when there is no such cause. Meanwhile doubting God’s mercy, they fall into these troubles.

The poets call them Furies, the Dread Ones; but it is conscience alone that supplies a thousand witnesses against us,

Night and day they carry their own witness in their breast.

It is an unceasing witness giving evidence, empanelling a jury to examine us and pronounce us guilty; a pursuer following with hue and cry, a court officer summoning us, a bailiff carrying us off, a sergeant arresting us, a lawyer pleading against us, a jailer tormenting us and a judge condemning us—continually accusing, denouncing, torturing and harassing.

And just as the statue of Juno in that sacred city near the Euphrates in Assyria always looks towards you—sit wherever you like in her temple, she stares directly at you; pass by, and her gaze follows—so in every position, place, gathering and action, our conscience will always be ready to accuse us.

After many pleasant days, fortunate ventures and merry seasons, conscience finally arrests us. A person may indeed escape punishment in this world, bribe a corrupt judge, evade the sentence of the law and flourish for a time;

for who ever saw, says Chrysostom, a greedy man troubled in mind while counting his money, or an adulterer grieving with his mistress in his arms? At such times we are drunk with pleasure and notice nothing:

yet, as the prodigal son at first had fine food, sweet music, merry company and jovial entertainment, but a cruel reckoning in the end, bitter as wormwood, a dreadful visitation commonly follows. The devil who then told you that it was a slight sin, or no sin at all, now magnifies it in the opposite direction and tells you it is an utterly unforgivable offence, as he did with Cain and Judas, to bring them to despair;

every small circumstance previously overlooked and despised will now magnify itself, rise in judgement and accuse them—the dust of their shoes, creatures without speech. As with Lucian’s tyrant, the bed and the candle, the bed and candle bore witness, tormenting their souls for their past sins.

Tragic examples of this kind are all too familiar and common. Hadrian, Galba, Nero, Otho, Vitellius and Caracalla were so horrified in conscience by their crimes—murders, rapes, extortion and wrongs—that they grew weary of life and could find no one to kill them.