Single out the most ignorant of them, convince his understanding, show him his errors and the gross absurdities of his sect: “You will not persuade me, even if you persuade me.” He will not be persuaded. As those pagans told the Jesuits in Japan, they would do as their forefathers had done; and, like Rathold, the Frisian prince, go to hell for company if most of their friends went there. They will not be moved: no persuasion, no torture can shake them.

Papists, then, cannot boast of their vows, poverty, obedience, religious orders, merits, martyrdoms, fasting, alms, good works and pilgrimages. I shall show you that as much as all this, and more, is and has been done by these superstitious Gentiles, pagans, idolaters and Jews. Their blind zeal and idolatrous superstition of every kind are much the same; there is little or no difference, and it is hard to say which is the greatest or the grossest.

For anyone who carefully considers those superstitious rites among the pagans in Japan, the Banians in Gujarat, Chinese idolaters, the ancient Americans, especially in Mexico, and Muslim priests, will find almost the same government, the same orders and ceremonies—or such similar ones that all may plainly seem to derive from some heathen spirit, with the Roman hierarchy no better than the rest.

In a word, this is common to all superstition: nothing is so mad and absurd, so ridiculous, impossible or incredible that they will not believe it, observe it and diligently carry it out as far as they can; nothing so monstrous to conceive, so intolerable to practise or so cruel to suffer that they will not willingly undertake it. Such is the power of superstition. “O Egypt,” as Trismegistus exclaims, “your religion consists of fables, and such as future generations will not believe.”

I know that even in true religion many mysteries are apprehended by faith alone: the Trinity, which the Turks especially mock; Christ’s Incarnation; and the resurrection of the body on the last day—“which must be believed precisely because,” says Tertullian, “it is incredible,” and so on. There are many miracles that are not to be questioned or disputed.

“To wonder, not to probe, is true wisdom,” says Gerhard; and “in divine matters,” as a good Father tells us, “some things are to be believed, others wondered at,” and so on. Some things are to be believed, embraced and followed with complete submission and obedience; others, again, to be wondered at.

Julian the Apostate mocks Christians on this point, “because we take our understanding captive in obedience to faith,” saying that the Christian Creed resembles the Pythagorean “He himself said it”: we make our will and understanding too slavishly subject to our faith, without further examination of the truth. Yet, as Saint Gregory rightly answers, our Creed is “of a higher excellence,” and far more divine;

and, as Thomas maintains, “For one who reflects devoutly, reasons are always available to show the credibility of supernatural mysteries.” We believe it absolutely, and on good grounds, for, as Gregory rightly tells us, “Faith has no merit where human reason seeks proof.” Faith that refuses to accept anything without certain demonstration has no merit and does not deserve the name of faith.

We must and will believe God’s word; and if we are mistaken or err in our common belief, we shall say, as Richard of Saint-Victor vows he will say to Christ himself on the day of judgment, “Lord, if we have been deceived, you alone have deceived us.” This is our plea.

But as for the rest, I will not defend that papal consubstantiation, to which Muslims and Jews justly object. As Campanella admits in Atheism Defeated, chapter 12, folio 125, “it is a most difficult doctrine, and no subject is more exposed to the blasphemies of heretics and the foolish mockery of worldly thinkers.”

They hold it impossible “that God should be eaten in bread”; and they mock it besides: “Look at a people eating their own God,” said a certain Moor.

“Flies and worms mock this God when they foul and devour him. He is subject to fire and water; thieves steal him and throw the golden pyx to the ground, yet this God does not defend himself. How can he be whole in every particle of the host—the selfsame body in so many places, in heaven and on earth?” And so on.

Yet anyone who reads the Turks’ Quran, the Jews’ Talmud and the Papists’ Golden Legend will swear that such gross inventions, fables, empty traditions, monstrous paradoxes and ceremonies could never have proceeded from any spirit but the Devil’s own, the author of confusion and lies. He will wonder, too, how the wise men among the Jews, such learned and intelligent men as Averroes and Avicenna, or those pagan philosophers, could ever have been persuaded to believe or assent to the smallest part of them, “or fail to expose the fraud.” The answer is that, as Vanini says, “For fear of the public authorities, the philosophers did not dare bark against them”: they dared not speak for fear of the law. But I shall come down to particulars: read their various symptoms and then judge.

Of the symptoms that belong specifically to superstition, or that irreligious religion, I may say, as I did of the rest, that some are ridiculous, while others are dreadful to relate. As evidence of the ridiculous ones, nothing could be better than the multitude of their gods, the absurd names, actions and duties they assign to them, their feasts, holy days, sacrifices, acts of worship, and the like.