The Anatomy of Melancholy

SUBSECTION 4. Prognosis of Religious Melancholy.

You can infer the prognosis from the symptoms. What can these signs predict but folly, mental confusion, madness, gross ignorance, despair, obstinacy, a corrupt understanding and a bad end? What else can superstition and heresy produce but wars, riots, disturbances, tormented souls, despair and a desolate land, as Jeremiah teaches in chapter 7, verse 34, when people practise idolatry and follow their own ways?

How could it be otherwise for them? What can they expect but blight, famine, scarcity and all the plagues of Egypt, as Amos declares in chapter 4, verses 9–10, and to be led into captivity? If our hopes are disappointed, if we sow much and harvest little, eat but do not have enough, drink but are not satisfied, clothe ourselves but are not warm, and so on, Haggai 1:6; if we expect much and it comes to little, why is this? His house lay waste while they attended to their own houses, verse 9; therefore heaven withheld its dew and the earth its fruit.

Because we are superstitious and irreligious and do not serve God as we ought, all these plagues and miseries fall upon us. What else can we expect but wars against one another, slaughter, dreadful deaths in this life and eternal damnation in the next? What but superstition has caused so many bloody battles and so much Christian bloodshed? The Spanish Inquisition, racks, breaking wheels, tortures and torments—where do they come from? From superstition.

The Frenchman Bodin, in his Method of History, calls the English barbarians because of their civil wars. But let him read about those battles like Pharsalus fought recently in France over religion, and their massacres, in which, by their own accounts, countless millions have perished in twenty-four years—whole families and cities—and he will find that ours were mere skirmishes beside theirs.

But heretics and idolaters have always made it their practice, when punished for their sins and visited by God’s just judgments, to acknowledge no fault in themselves and put all the blame on others. In Cyprian’s time he and an idolater called Demetrius disputed intensely about who caused the calamities of their day. Demetrius blamed the Christians for everything, as people always did in the early Church, as the first book of Arnobius shows.

There were no longer the usual winter rains or ripening summer heat, such seasonable springs or fruitful autumns; no marble quarries in the mountains, less gold and silver than before; farmers, sailors and soldiers were all in short supply; justice, friendship and skill in the arts had all declined. This was the Christians’ fault, and all their other miseries came from them, because you do not worship our gods—because they did not worship their gods.

But Cyprian turns it all back upon him, as his treatise against him shows. It is true that the world is miserably tormented and shaken by wars, scarcity, famine, fire, floods and plagues, and that many deadly diseases rage among us; but these things happen, not as you complain because your gods are not worshipped by us, but because God is not worshipped by you, who neither seek nor fear him.