The Anatomy of Melancholy

Some of those religions are so fanciful and extravagant, yet defended so fiercely with equal firmness and certainty, that they infer: if there are so many religious sects, each denied by the others, why may they not all be false? Why should one or another be preferred to the rest? The Sceptics press this argument; among others, Sextus Empiricus reaches this conclusion in book 8 of Against the Mathematicians.

After many philosophical arguments and reasons for and against the existence of gods, he concludes: since so many contend with one another, and so on, only one can be true, as Cicero likewise argues. Christians say that they alone worship the true God; they pity all other sects and lament their condition.

Yet those ancient Greeks and Romans who worshipped the Devil, as the Chinese do now, or local gods—their own gods—were much nobler, more high-spirited and victorious, with a more flourishing commonwealth, better cities, soldiers, scholars and minds: so Julian the Apostate, Caecilius in Minucius, Celsus and the philosopher Porphyry object, and Machiavelli maintains. Their gods often overcame our gods and performed as many miracles, and so on.

Saint Cyril, Arnobius, Minucius and many other ancient writers defend Christianity well, as more recently do Lessius, Duplessis-Mornay, Grotius in On the Truth of the Christian Religion, and Savonarola in On the Truth of the Christian Faith. Zanchi, Campanella, Marin Mersenne, Bozio and Gentillet answer all these atheistical arguments at length. But another difficulty troubles many people, as it did in ancient times: wicked people generally prosper; professed atheists prosper.

There are no gods, and heaven is empty, Selius declares; his proof is that he sees himself Made prosperous while denying these things.

There are no gods; the heavens are a fiction, Selius publicly maintains; For while he thus denies their divinity, He prospers all the more.

This is a principal argument: for the most part, the sincerest, most upright, honest and good people are brought low. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong (Ecclesiastes 9:11), nor bread to the wise, nor favour or riches to people of understanding; time and chance come to all.

There was a great plague at Athens, as Thucydides relates in book 2, during which everyone eventually acted with great licence, doing as he pleased without regard for divine or human laws. Neither fear of God nor human laws, he says, restrained anyone, because the plague carried off good and bad alike. They therefore concluded that worshipping or not worshipping the gods made no difference, since all perished alike.

Some raise objections and doubts about Scripture itself: it cannot accord with God’s mercy that so many should be damned, so many be bad and so few good; that there should be such contention over religions, all obstinate in their own cause, equally factional, equally prosperous, yet bitterly persecuting and condemning one another to damnation.