Causes of religious melancholy. From the Devil, through miracles, apparitions and oracles. His instruments or agents: politicians, priests, impostors, heretics and blind guides. In them: credulity, fear, blind zeal, ignorance, solitude, curiosity, pride, vanity, presumption and so on. His devices: fasting, solitude, hope, fear and the rest.

We are taught in Holy Scripture that the Devil roams abroad like a roaring lion, always seeking someone to devour. In various shapes, and by various devices and tricks, he goes about enticing us astray. Sometimes he transforms himself into an angel of light; and he is so cunning that he could, if it were possible, deceive even the elect.

He insists on being worshipped as God himself, and the heathen revere and regard him as such. In imitation of that divine power, as Eusebius observes, and to mock or rival God’s glory, as Dandini adds, he demands that all homage, sacrifices, offerings and everything else belonging to God’s worship be offered to him as well: he will be like the Most High. By this means he makes fools of the world, deceiving, ensnaring and destroying many thousands of souls.

Sometimes the Devil speaks to them in various shapes through dreams and visions, as God spoke directly and intimately to Moses. This is common in the Indies, and in China nothing is more familiar than apparitions, inspirations and oracles. He terrifies them with false portents and counterfeit miracles, sends storms, tempests, diseases and plagues—as in ancient Athens there was Apollo the Averter of Evil, Apollo the Pestilential, the plague-bringer and the dispeller of evils—raises wars and rebellions through spectres, troubles their consciences and drives them to despair, mental terrors and unbearable pain. Through promises, rewards, benefits and gentle means he inspires such belief in his divinity and greatness that they dare do nothing but worship him and obey his will: they dare not offend him.

And to compel them to fear him still more, he sends and cures diseases, disturbs their spirits, as Cyprian says, and torments and terrifies their souls to make them worship him. All his attention and effort goes towards turning them from true religion to superstition; and because he is himself damned and in error, he would have the whole world share his errors and be damned with him.

The first moving cause, therefore, the first mover of all superstition, is the Devil, that great enemy of mankind, the chief agent who, in a thousand different shapes and forms, with various devices and illusions and under various names, has deceived the inhabitants of the earth in different places and countries, always rejoicing at their falls.

Throughout the world before Christ’s time he ruled unchecked and held human souls in the most abject slavery, says Eusebius, through various forms, ceremonies and sacrifices, until Christ’s coming; as though those devils of the air, whom the Platonists took for gods, had divided the earth among themselves—we are the gods’ plaything—and were our rulers and guardians.

In different places they had different rites, orders and names, on which read Weyer’s On the Deceptions of Demons, book 1, chapter 5, Strozzi, Cicogna and others: Adonided among the Syrians; Adramelech among the Capernaites; Asiniæ among the Emathites; Astartes among the Sidonians; Asteroth among the Palestinians; Dagon among the Philistines; Tartary among the Hanæi; Melchonis among the Ammonites; the Babylonian Beli; Beelzebub and Baal among the Samaritans and Moabites; Apis, Isis and Osiris among the Egyptians; Pythian Apollo at Delphi, Colophon, Ancyra, Cumae and Erythrae; Jupiter in Crete; Venus in Cyprus; Juno at Carthage; Aesculapius at Epidaurus; Diana at Ephesus; Pallas at Athens; and so on.

Even in our own days, in both the East and West Indies, in Tartary, China, Japan and elsewhere, what strange idols are worshipped, in what monstrous forms and with what absurd ceremonies! What strange sacraments resembling our baptism and the Lord’s Supper, what splendid temples, priests and sacrifices they had in America when the Spaniards first landed there—let the Jesuit Acosta relate it in book 5, chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and following, along with the way the Devil imitated the Ark and the children of Israel’s departure from Egypt, and many similar things.

For, as Lipsius explains well from the Stoics’ teaching, above all they desire human worship: now as in the past, their constant and chief desire is to be worshipped by human beings. Just see what Varthema, book 5, chapter 2, Marco Polo, Léry, Benzoni, Peter Martyr in his Decades of the Ocean, Acosta, and Matteo Ricci in book 1 of the Christian Expedition to China relate.

Eusebius wonders how that wise city of Athens and the flourishing kingdoms of Greece could be so stupefied; and we in our own times wonder how those intelligent Chinese, so discerning in everything else, can be so deceived, so tormented by superstition, so blind as to worship wood and stone. But it is no wonder when we see every bit as powerful effects among Christians themselves. How miserably deluded are those Anabaptists and Arians, and above all the Papists!

Mars, Jupiter, Apollo and Aesculapius have handed over their authority, names and functions to Saint George,

(Greatest ruler of wars, whom our young men Worship in place of Mars.)———

to Saint Christopher and a host of fictitious saints; Venus has handed hers over to Our Lady of Loreto. And just as the ancient Romans had separate gods for different functions, people and places, so these people have saints, as Lavater aptly observes from Lactantius: with only the name changed, it is still the same spirit or Devil that deceives them.