The Anatomy of Melancholy

Those in between—some for private profit, the hope of advancement in the Church (who taught the parrot its “greetings”?), popularity or servile flattery—must and will believe all their paradoxes and absurd doctrines without exception. Just as stubbornly, they will uphold and practise all their traditions and idolatrous ceremonies to the death, for their religion is half a business.

They will defend everything, even the Golden Legend, with all its lies and stories, such as those of Saint George, Saint Christopher, Saint Winifred, Saint Denis and the rest. It is astonishing to see how Nicholas Harpsfield, that pharisaical impostor among the others, in his Ecclesiastical History, chapter 22 of the first six centuries, ties himself in knots defending the ridiculous fable of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins: when they lived, how they came to Cologne, who martyred them, and so on.

Although he can say nothing in its favour, he must and will endorse it: “Ursula and her companions,” he says, “ennobled this century. I wish her history were as clear and certain to me as I am clearly and certainly convinced that she is a blessed virgin in heaven with her companions.”

They must and will, I say, believe out of blind zeal, or shift their compass with everyone else as the latitude of religion changes, adapting themselves to the times and seasons. Through fear and flattery they are willing to give their assent and do everything in their power to uphold and defend the existing government.

And servile churchmen—scholastic theologians, canon lawyers, Jesuits, friars, priests, orators and sophists—either because they had nothing else to do, their over-abundant ingenuity finding no other occupation in those idle times when the Church had few or no open opponents, or to defend more effectively their lies, fictions, miracles, transubstantiations, traditions, papal pardons, purgatories, masses, impossibilities and so on,

have used splendid displays, attractive pretexts, imposing words and plausible ingenuity to invent a thousand pointless questions, minute distinctions, subtleties, objections and solutions, moral and allegorical interpretations to explain away every appearance and objection; such quirks and quiddities, disputations on any subject whatever—as Bale says of Ferribrigge and Strode—counterexamples, extensions, decrees, glosses and canons,

so that sound commentaries and good preachers have been replaced by a crowd of mad sophists, first-and-second-part-of-the-second-part men, sectarians, canon lawyers, Sorbonne theologians and Franciscan friars, with a mob of pointless controversies and questions: Is the pope God, or something like God? Does he share both of Christ’s natures?

Is it as possible for God to be a bumblebee or a gourd as a man? Can he produce a relation without a foundation or an object, make a prostitute a virgin, or fetch Trajan’s soul from hell—and how? Then comes a crowd of questions about hellfire: is it a greater sin to kill a man or patch shoes on a Sunday? Can God make another God like himself?