out of pride, a desire to stand apart, vainglory and blind zeal, they cause still more madness. They throw everything into uproar with their new doctrines, paradoxes, inventions and fancies; create new divisions, subdivisions and sects; set one superstition against another and one kingdom against another; pit ruler against subjects, brother against brother, father against son; ruin and destroy a commonwealth, disturb the peace, and throw every rank of society into confusion.

How those Arians raged in former times! How many did they ensnare? Those Pelagians, Manichaeans and the rest—their names alone would fill a whole volume. How many simple souls have impostors continually deceived, drawn away and wholly estranged from Christ! Lucian’s Alexander; Simon Magus, whose statue could be seen and worshipped in Rome after his death, Justin Martyr says, inscribed “To Simon, the holy god,” and so on;

Apollonius of Tyana; Cynops; Eumo, who, by devising sham new ceremonies and conjuring tricks connected with that Syrian goddess, spitting fire and the like, gathered an army of forty thousand men and did much harm;

and Eudo de Stellis, of whom William of Newburgh speaks in book 1, chapter 19: in King Stephen’s days he imitated most of Christ’s miracles, fed I do not know how many people in the wilderness, and built castles in the air, and so on, misleading multitudes of poor souls.

In Franconia in 1476, a low-born, illiterate fellow took it upon himself to be a prophet and to preach. His name was John Beheim, a cattle herder at Nicholhausen. He led thirty thousand people astray, and the common people regarded him as a most holy man come from heaven.

Tradesmen left their shops, women their distaffs; servants ran away from their masters, children from their parents, and students left their tutors, all to hear him, some for novelty, some from zeal. At last he was burned by the bishop of Würzburg, and so he and his heresy disappeared together.

How many such impostors and false prophets have lived in every king’s reign? What chronicle does not offer examples? Like so many will-o’-the-wisps, they have led people astray, frightened some and deceived others, people ready to be blown about by every gust of wind: an uncultivated, fickle multitude, a simple company of poor souls who follow anyone and are huddled together like pebbles washed up by the tide.

The monstrous follies, madness, torments, persecutions, absurdities and impossibilities that these impostors, heretics and the rest have thrust upon the world, and their strange effects, will be shown in the Symptoms.

Now the means by which the Devil and his infernal ministers so deceive and unsettle the world with these empty ceremonies, false doctrines and superstitious follies—the advantages they exploit—come from people themselves: inborn fear, ignorance and simplicity; Hope and Fear, those two battering cannon and chief siege engines, with their objects, reward and punishment, purgatory, the limbo of the fathers, and so on, which tyrannize now more than ever.

For what province is free from atheism, superstition, idolatry, schism, heresy and impiety, or from their agents and followers? From these things they arise, and from that same impaired image of God that still remains in us.

He gave mankind an uplifted face, and bade us look Towards heaven—

Our own conscience tells us as much: we know that there is a God, and nature teaches us this. “No nation is so barbarous,” says Cicero, “that the conviction that God exists is not implanted in it; neither Scythian, Greek, Persian nor Hyperborean will disagree,” as the Platonist Maximus of Tyre further adds in sermon 1, “nor any inhabitant of the mainland or the islands.”

Let a person live where he will, in whatever region: no nation is so barbarous that it is not persuaded there is a God. It is astonishing to read of the boundless superstition of this kind among the Indians, of their beliefs in America: “Each, according to his own pleasure, superstitiously worshipped various things—plants, animals, mountains and so on—everything they loved or feared” (except, as he admits, a few places that had no god at all).

Thus “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament declares his handiwork,” Psalm 19. Every created thing will prove it:

And every plant reveals God’s presence.

“Unwillingly they know it; reluctantly they confess it,” as the same Maximus of Tyre continues: willing or unwilling, they must acknowledge it. The philosophers Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Pythagoras, Trismegistus, Seneca and Epictetus, the Magi, Druids and the rest, went as far as they could by the light of nature. “They left many splendid writings on the nature of God,” wrote many things well about God’s nature; but they had only an indistinct light, a glimpse:

As under a wavering moon, in grudging light, A journey passes through the woods—

Like someone walking by moonlight in a wood, they groped in the dark; their knowledge was crude. As the speaker in Euripides says, “O God, whatever you are, whether heaven, earth or something else”; and that saying attributed to Aristotle, “Being of beings, have mercy on me.” The same was true of the soul’s immortality and happiness in the life to come.

“Pythagoras dreamed of the soul’s immortality,” says Jerome; “Democritus did not believe in it; Socrates discussed it in prison to console himself for his condemnation. Indian, Persian, Goth and the rest philosophize about it.”

So some said one thing, some another, according to their own conceptions. Perceiving this, the Devil led them further astray, as Lemnius observes, and made them worship him as their god through blocks of wood and stones, and torture themselves to their own destruction, just as he pleased. He inspired his priests and ministers with lies and fictions to pursue the same purpose, which they were equally willing to undertake for their own ends, exploiting people’s simplicity, fear and ignorance.