The Anatomy of Melancholy

When we see and read of such cruel wars, tumults, uproars and bloody battles, so many people killed and so many cities ruined—for what else fills almost all our histories but bills, bows and guns?—so many murders and massacres: where is charity?

Or see people wholly devoted to God—churchmen, professed theologians, holy men—“make the trumpet of the Gospel the trumpet of war”: a company of hell-born Jesuits and fiery-spirited friars “carrying the torch” before every rebellion, like so many firebrands setting the whole world quarrelling.

I say nothing of their contentious and abusive books, whole ages spent writing against one another with such venom and bitterness, “with Bion’s discourses and black salt.” And their bloody inquisitions, which in thirty years, Bale says, destroyed 39 princes, 148 earls, 235 barons and 14,755 common people—worse than those ten persecutions—may justly make us ask: where is charity?

“I ask you, what sort of Christians are these!” Are these Christians? Tell me, I beg you. Anyone who witnesses these things may say to them, as Cato said to Caesar, “I believe you think the things said about the underworld are false.” Surely, I think, you believe there is neither heaven nor hell.

Let them profess religion and zeal, make whatever displays they please, give alms, act as peacemakers and attend sermons: if we may judge the tree by its fruit, they are no better than hypocrites, Epicureans and atheists; with “the fool, they say in their hearts that there is no God.”

It is no wonder, then, if, being so uncharitable and hard-hearted, we suffer so many and such frequent discontents, such fits of melancholy, so many bitter pangs and mutual quarrels, everything in turmoil, constant complaints, widespread grievances and general calamities; “if there are such tragedies on earth, shaking and miserably tearing the human race apart”; if so many plagues, wars, uproars, losses, deluges, fires and floods, God’s vengeance and the plagues of Egypt, do not come upon us. We are so vicious towards one another, so heedless of God and our neighbours, and by our crying sins bring these miseries down on our own heads.

More than that, we have good reason to fear what Josephus once said of his Jewish countrymen: “If the Romans had not come when they did to sack their city, surely it would have been swallowed by an earthquake or flood, or burned by fire from heaven like Sodom and Gomorrah, such was their desperate malice, wickedness and perversity.”

We have reason to suspect that, if we persist in these wretched ways, we may expect equally severe visitations. If we had any awareness or feeling for these things, surely we would not go on as we do, following such wayward courses and practising every kind of impiety; our whole conduct would not be so opposed to God.