The Anatomy of Melancholy

Anyone who looks into their lives and sees such monstrous vices—people so unrestrained in lust, unspeakable in malice, furious in rage, flattering and dissembling entirely for their own ends—will surely think they are not truly religious but hardened in heart, most of them depraved in understanding, as in this age. Let them conduct themselves as they please for now and dissemble as best they can: a time will come when they must account for themselves. Their melancholy is close at hand. They bring a plague and curse upon their own heads: they store up God’s wrath.

Besides, all who are insulting towards the gods, who blaspheme, despise or neglect God, or mock him, will certainly regret it in the end. So the poets tell of Salmoneus, who mockingly tried to imitate Jupiter’s thunder and was hurled down for his pains: Jupiter thundered in reply, and so on. Whoever spits into heaven spits upon himself. Their doom is near, and hell is ready to receive them.

Some hold that meanwhile it is useless to argue with such atheistical spirits: disputation is not the best way to reclaim them. Atheism, idolatry, heresy and hypocrisy have a common root—indulgence of corrupt passions—but they develop differently, have different symptoms and causes, and require different cures and remedies.

It is true that some deny there is any God; some acknowledge one but do not believe it; a third kind acknowledge and believe, but will not live by his laws, worship him or obey him. Others accept God and subordinate gods, but not one God, no such universal God, no God of that kind, instead assigning different local gods to different places. Those people, as Socinus would have it, should not persecute one another over their differences, but love and care for one another.

To describe them individually and set out their arguments and reasons would require a full volume. I therefore refer anyone seeking fuller satisfaction to the subtle, carefully worked treatises, the devout and celebrated writings of our learned theologians, including the scholastics and casuists. They offer abundant reasons to prove God’s existence, the soul’s immortality and so forth; by intellectual power and philosophy they supply irrefutable arguments for receptive, well-disposed readers. At least they answer every quibble and objection, refuting their opponents’ folly and madness and bringing them, if it could be done, to a sound mind, to a better disposition—though often with little effect.

Among others, consult Giulio Cesare Lagalla, professor of philosophy in Rome, who has recently written a large volume to refute atheists; on the soul’s immortality, Hieronymus Montanus’s On the Immortality of the Soul, and Laelius Vincentius on the same subject; Thomas Giaminus; and Franciscus Collius’s On the Souls of Pagans after Death, by a celebrated doctor of the Ambrosian College in Milan.

Bishop Fotherby in his Scourge of Atheists, Dr Dove, Dr Jackson, Abernethy and Corderoy have written well on this subject in our own language; in Latin, Colerus, Zanchi, Paleario, Illyricus, Philippus, Faber of Faenza and others.