Treatment of despair through medicine, good counsel, consolation, and so on.

Experience teaches us that although many die obstinate and wilful in this illness, multitudes in turn can resist and overcome it, seek help and find comfort. They are taken from the jaws of the underworld, from the jaws of hell and out of the devil’s claws, even though they have bound themselves over to him. Some recover through their own strength and God’s assistance—Though he kill me, says Job, yet will I trust in him—others through good counsel, advice and medicine.

Bellovacus cured a monk by changing his habit and way of life; Platter cured many through medicine alone. But generally the two must work together. Those who think they can overcome this deadly affliction through medicine alone take the wrong course, and those who expect to achieve it through good advice alone are equally mistaken. Although each is powerful in itself, united strength is greater: they must go hand in hand in treating this disease:

——so each seeks the other’s help.

As for medicine, the same course should be followed here as in other forms of melancholy: diet, air, exercise and all those passions and disturbances of the mind, and so on, must be put right by the same means. They must not be left alone or to themselves, never idle, never without company.

Counsel and good consolation must be suited to the person’s disposition and to the causes: loss, fear, grief, discontent or some such disastrous event; a guilty conscience; or frequent meditation and an excessively painful apprehension and consideration of one’s past life. It must be corrected and counterbalanced through hearing and reading Scripture, good theologians, sound advice and conversation, applying God’s word to their distressed souls:

Many excellent exhortations and discourses of moral counsel are available for this purpose, for anyone troubled in mind. Perkins, Greenham, Hayward, Bright, Abernethy, Bolton, Culmannus, Hemmingius, Caelius Secundus and Nicholas Laurentius write extensively on the subject; so do Azorius, Navarrus, Sayrus and others who have written cases of conscience among our Catholic writers.

But because these works are not at everyone’s hand or always so easily obtained, I will, for the benefit and relief of the afflicted and at some friends’ request, gather from their extensive treatises a few consoling sayings, exhortations, arguments and pieces of advice concerning this subject, and from God’s word. For I know, as Culmannus says on a similar occasion, how ineffective and futile human counsels are for comforting an afflicted conscience unless God’s word joins and accompanies them, from which come life, relief, repentance, and so on.

First I presuppose what Beza, Greenham, Perkins and Bolton require: before any remedies are applied, those receiving counsel must be sufficiently prepared, humbled for their sins and ready for consolation; they must have confessed and been examined as to how deeply they are affected, their present disposition and their capacity to receive good advice. It is therefore to those so thoroughly explored and examined that I address the following discourse.

Hemmingius identifies two chief antidotes to despair: good hope from God’s word, to be embraced; and perverse complacency and presumption, arising from the devil’s deceit, to be rejected. The former is the soul’s salvation, the latter its plague: one saves, the other kills; it kills the soul, says Augustine, and does as much harm as despair itself.

Navarrus the casuist lists ten particular remedies from Antoninus, part 1, title 3, chapter 10: 1. God. 2. Medicine. 3. Avoiding the objects that caused it. 4. Submitting oneself to other people’s judgement. 5. Answering every objection, and so on. Cajetan, Gerson in his On the Spiritual Life, and Sayrus in book 1 of his Cases of Conscience, chapter 14, repeat and approve all these from Emanuel Rodrigues, chapters 51 and 52.

Greenham prescribes six particular rules, Culmannus seven. First, acknowledge that all help comes from God. 2. That sin is the cause of their present misery. 3. Repent and be sincerely sorry for their sins. 4. Pray earnestly to God for relief. 5. Look for and implore the Church’s prayers and good people’s advice. 6. Medicine. 7. Entrust themselves to God and rely on his mercy. Others put it differently, but all to this effect.

But since most people with this illness are spiritually sick, almost deprived of reason, overwhelmed by their miseries and by an excessively deep apprehension of their sins, they cannot attend to good counsel, pray, believe or repent. We must therefore do all we can to meet and help their particular infirmities, according to their different causes and symptoms, as we find them suffering and complaining.

What chiefly terrifies and torments most people troubled in mind is the enormity of their offences, the intolerable burden of their sins and God’s heavy wrath and displeasure, apprehended so deeply that they consider themselves reprobates, utterly forsaken by God, already damned, beyond all hope of grace and incapable of receiving mercy, the devil’s slaves, slaves of sin, with offences so great that they cannot be forgiven.

But these people must know that no sin is so heinous as to be unpardonable in itself; no crime is so great that God’s mercy cannot forgive it. Where sin abounds, grace abounds much more, Romans 5:20. And what the Lord said to Paul in his extremity, 2 Corinthians 11:9—My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect through weakness—concerns everyone in a similar case.

His promises are made without restriction to all believers, addressed generally to all who are truly penitent, grieved by their offences and desirous of reconciliation, concerning the forgiveness of sins. Matthew 9:12–13: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance; that is, those whose consciences are truly touched by their sins. Again, Matthew 11:28: Come to me, all you who are heavily burdened, and I will give you relief.

Ezekiel 18:27: Whenever a sinner repents of his sins from the bottom of his heart, I will blot all his wickedness from my remembrance, says the Lord. Isaiah 43:25: I, even I, am he who puts away your iniquity for my own sake, and will not remember your sins.