The Anatomy of Melancholy

What else do our Papists do but put forward and spread all their new ceremonies and traditions by keeping the people ignorant? They conceal Scripture, read it in Latin and only to a few, meanwhile feeding the servile people with tales from saints’ legends and similar fabulous stories.

Whom do they begin with, or more readily ensnare, than fallen-away ladies, a few tradesmen, superstitious old people, illiterate persons, weak women, and dissatisfied, uncultivated, simple fellows? All our schismatics and heretics do the same. The heretics Marcus and Valentinus, in Irenaeus, first led astray I do not know how many women and made them believe they were prophets. Friar Cornelius of Dort led a company of simple women astray.

What are all our Anabaptists, Brownists, Barrowists and Familists but a company of uncultivated, illiterate, capricious, low fellows? What are most of our Papists but stupid, ignorant, blind horses? How could they be otherwise, when they are brought up and continually kept in darkness?

“If their pastors,” says Lavater, “had done their duty and instructed their flocks as they ought in the principles of Christian religion, or had not forbidden them to read Scripture, they would not have been as they are.” But misled throughout their lives by superstition, and carried about blindfolded like hooded hawks, how can they turn out as anything but blind fools and superstitious asses? What else should we expect from them?

Nor is it enough to keep them blind and in Cimmerian darkness. Like a schoolmaster making his boys attend to their books, sometimes through hopeful expectations, promises and encouragement, but chiefly through fear, strict discipline, severity, threats and punishment, they flatter and coax their simple listeners and so bring them into a fool’s paradise.

“You will be king, they say, if you act rightly”: do well and you shall be crowned. But chiefly, through threats, terrors and alarms, they tyrannize over and frighten people’s distressed souls, knowing that fear alone is the sole means of keeping them obedient. According to that half-line of Petronius, “Fear first created gods in the world”: fear of divine and supreme powers keeps people obedient and makes them do their duty. They play upon their consciences.

This was practised long ago by the priests in Egypt: when there was an eclipse, they made the people believe God was angry and great miseries were coming. They seize every opportunity offered by natural causes to deceive people’s senses: terrifying stories from purgatory, invented apparitions, earthquakes in Japan or China, dreadful examples of devils, possessions, demonic harassment, false miracles, counterfeit visions, and so on.