The Anatomy of Melancholy

SUBSECTION 5 The Cure of Religious Melancholy

To purge the world of idolatry and superstition will require some monster-taming Hercules, a divine Asclepius, or Christ himself to come in person and reign on earth for a thousand years before the end, as the millenarians would have him do.

People are generally so resistant, so confident in their own opinions, so obstinate and firmly attached to the religion in which they were raised, that no persuasion, terror or persecution can turn them from it. This consideration has induced many states to allow them freedom of conscience as they themselves choose.

Jews are tolerated in most provinces of Europe; in Asia they have their synagogues. The Spaniards allow Moors to live among them; the Mughals allow non-Muslims; the Turks allow all religions. In Europe, Poland and Amsterdam are the common places of refuge.

Some believe that no one ought to be coerced in matters of conscience: whatever religion a person follows, he may be saved, just as Cornelius was accepted in former times—Jew, Turk, Anabaptist or anyone else—provided he is honest, lives soberly and peaceably in his professed faith, and serves his own God with due fear and reverence. Volkel, Crell and the other Socinians now settled around Kraków and Raków in Poland have revived this opinion.

Let every city, Laelius, have its own religion, and let us have ours. Cicero thought that every city should be free in this respect to worship its own protective and local gods—its tutelary and local gods, as Symmachus calls them.

Isocrates advises Demonicus that, when he comes to a foreign city, he should by all means worship the gods of the place, and that each local god ought to be worshipped in the way that he himself has commanded. Caecilius in Minucius presses this point, wishing every nation to retain its ancestral religious rites and worship its local gods—to keep its own ceremonies and worship its particular gods.

Pomponius Mela reports this of the Africans: They worship their own gods according to ancestral custom—they worship their own gods according to their own prescribed practice. For why, as the speaker argues there, should any one nation claim this universality for its God, as Christians do: their God, whom they neither show nor see, supposedly moving about and present everywhere, investigating everyone’s conduct, actions and secret thoughts, and so on?

Let every province enjoy its liberty in this matter, worshipping one god or all, as it chooses and is taught. The Romans built altars to the gods of Asia, Europe and Libya, to unknown and foreign gods; others did otherwise, and so on. Pliny the Younger, as his letter to Trajan shows, would not have had Christians persecuted so harshly.