The Anatomy of Melancholy

and how many thousands come each year to make offerings, at such expense, trouble, anxiety and superstition—for forty separate Masses are said daily in some of their churches, and they rise at every hour of the night for Mass and come barefoot; how they exhaust themselves, their time, possessions, lives and fortunes in such ridiculous observances; their tales and inventions, false miracles, buying and selling of pardons, and indulgences for forty thousand years to come;

their processions on appointed days, their strict fasts, monks, anchorites, mendicant friars, Franciscans, Carthusians and the rest; their vigils and fasts, their ceremonies at Christmas, Shrovetide, Candlemas, Palm Sunday, St Blaise’s, St Martin’s and St Nicholas’s days; their adorations and exorcisms—will think that all those Greek, pagan and Muslim superstitions, gods, idols and ceremonies have passed in a debased form into Christianity, with only the name, time, place and outward appearance changed.

By preferring traditions to Scripture, those evangelical counsels—poverty, obedience, vows, alms, fasting and works beyond strict obligation—to God’s commandments, putting their own ordinances in place of his precepts, and keeping people in ignorance and blindness,

they have, through their cunning manoeuvres, strict discipline and servile upbringing, reduced ordinary people to such a state that, on pain of damnation, they dare not break the slightest ceremony, tradition or decree. They consider it a greater sin to eat a morsel of meat in Lent than to kill a person. Their consciences are so terrified that they are ready to despair if a minor ceremony is omitted.

They will accuse their own father, mother, brother, sister and closest and dearest friends of heresy if they do not act as they do. They will be foremost among their executioners, the first to help bring a bundle of firewood to burn them.

Whatever fine or penance is imposed, they dare do nothing but obey: roll with St Francis in the mud among pigs if ordered, wear wool next to the skin, whip themselves, build hospitals and abbeys, go to the East or West Indies, kill a king or run onto a sword’s point. They do everything without a murmur or hesitation, and believe everything.

As little children believe that every bronze statue Lives and is human, so these people think every fiction True, and believe that bronze statues have a heart.

As children think their dolls are living things, So they believe the bronze images they see.

And while the less educated are swept headlong by blind zeal, cheated and tormented by their superstitions, their own over-credulous simplicity and ignorance, their Epicurean popes and hypocritical cardinals laugh secretly and make merry in their rooms with their prostitutes. They indulge their appetites and pamper themselves.