The Muslims extend throughout the Great Turk’s dominions in Europe, Africa and Asia, to the Sharif’s lands in Barbary and his territories in Fez, Sus, Morocco and elsewhere. The Tartar, the Great Mughal and the Shah of Persia, with most of their dominions and subjects, are Muslims today. See how the Devil rages! These are at odds among themselves: some support Ali, some Abu Bakr, Umar or Uthman, those four teachers and successors of Muhammad; and they are subdivided into seventy-two lesser sects, as Leo Africanus reports.

The Jews are scattered everywhere like a band of vagabonds. Their history, present condition and development through time are fully set out by Thomas Jackson, Doctor of Divinity, in his commentary on the Creed. A fifth of the world, and scarcely that, now professes Christ; yet it is so stuffed and interwoven with various superstitions that scarcely a sound part, or any agreement among its members, can be found.

Prester John in Africa, ruler of the Abyssinians or Ethiopians, professes Christianity, but their religion differs so much from ours, with such strange absurdities and ceremonies, such licence and such a mixture of idolatry and paganism, that they retain little more than the bare name of Christianity. They permit polygamy, circumcision, extraordinary fasts, divorce at their own pleasure and so on; and just as the Papists invoke the Virgin Mary, they invoke Thomas Didymus in preference to Christ.

The Greek or Eastern Church is separated from that of the West. As it has four chief patriarchs, so it has four subdivisions, besides the Nestorians, Jacobites, Syrians, Armenians, Georgians and others scattered across Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere: Greece, Wallachia, Circassia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Albania, Illyricum, Slavonia, Croatia, Thrace, Serbia, Rascia, and a scattering among the Tartars.

The Russians, Muscovites and most of that grand duke’s subjects belong to the Greek Church and remain Christians; but, as one writer says, over time they have added many superstitions. In the course of time they have added so many superstitions that they are more half-Christian than anything else. What remains is the Western Church here with us in Europe, but so obscured by various schisms, heresies and superstitions that one hardly knows where to find it.

The Papists have Italy, Spain, Savoy, parts of Germany, France and Poland, and a scattering throughout the rest of Europe. In America they hold all the lands inhabited by Spaniards: New Spain, Golden Castile, Peru and so on. In the East Indies they have the Philippines and some small strongholds around Goa, Malacca, Ceylon, Hormuz and elsewhere, which the Portuguese acquired not long ago; and those land-leaping Jesuits have made attempts in China and Japan, as their annual letters show. In Africa they have Malindi, Kilwa, Mombasa and a few other towns: they drive out one superstition with another.

Poland is a gathering place for every religion: Samosatans, Socinians, Photinians—now protected in Transylvania and Poland—Arians and Anabaptists can be found there, as in some German cities. Scandinavia is Christian, but, as the Portuguese knight Damião de Góis complains, so mixed with magic and pagan rites and ceremonies that its people might equally well be counted idolaters.

What Tacitus once said of a similar nation is borne out in them: a people subject to superstition and opposed to religion.

Some of them, such as those around Lapland and the Pilapians, remain the Devil’s possession to this day. This wretched people, says my author, has until now been Satan’s possession, a thing most astonishing and lamentable; and what is to be wondered at and pitied is that, if any of them are baptized—as the kings of Sweden work hard to bring about—they die within seven or nine days afterwards. For that reason they can scarcely be brought to Christianity, but continue to worship the Devil, who appears to them daily. In their idolatrous practices, their ancestral gods, whom they devoutly worship, rejoice, and so on. They are very superstitious, like our wild Irish, although the more eminent among them—the kings of Denmark and Sweden themselves, who govern them—are Lutherans.

The remainder are Calvinists and Lutherans, equally mixed in Germany; yet the emperor himself, the dukes of Lorraine and Bavaria, and most of the prince-electors are professed Papists. And although parts of France and Ireland, Great Britain, half the cantons of Switzerland and the Low Countries are Calvinist, and purer than the rest, they are still at odds among themselves and are not free from superstition.

And as the monk Brochard concluded in his description of the Holy Land, after criticizing the Greek Church and setting out its errors, God grant that many follies have not crept in among the Latins, so I say: God grant there are no foolish practices in our Church. Just as dammed water, stopped in one place, breaks out in another, so does superstition.

I say nothing of Anabaptists, Socinians, Brownists, Barrowists, Familists and so on. There is superstition in our prayers, often in our listening to sermons; there are bitter quarrels, denunciations, persecutions and strange notions, besides differences of opinion, schisms, factions and the rest.

But as the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite and his two friends in Job 42:7, his anger was kindled against them because they had not spoken rightly of him, so we may justly say of these schismatics and heretics, however wise they consider themselves, they do not speak rightly of God. They neither speak, think nor write properly of God, as they ought.

And therefore, as Erasmus concludes to Dorp: What, I ask you, my dear Dorp, are we to do with these theologians? What would you wish for them, except perhaps a trustworthy physician to treat their brains? What should we wish them but a sound mind and a good physician? But more of their differences, paradoxes, opinions and mad antics under the symptoms: I now hurry on to the causes.