The Anatomy of Melancholy

Marin Mersenne suspects Cardano, for his subtleties, Campanella, and Charron’s Book of Wisdom, with some other works, of having a taint of atheism. Among the rest is that pestilent book On the Three Impostors of the World, which, he says, you cannot read without horror; and The Cymbal of the World, in four dialogues, by Des Périers, printed at Paris in 1538, and so on.

And as every age has had such blasphemous spirits, so they have never lacked patrons, protectors, disciples and adherents. Never have there been so many atheists in Italy and Germany, says Colerus, as in this age. Mersenne makes the same complaint about France: fifty thousand in the city of Paris alone.

The emperor Frederick, as Matthew Paris records, although it ought not to be repeated—I use his own words—is reported to have said that three deceivers, Moses, Christ and Muhammad, misled all the people of their own times in order to rule the world.

Henry, Landgrave of Hesse, heard him say it: If the princes of the empire followed my teaching, I would establish a much better way of believing and living.

To these professed atheists we may well add that impious and carnal crowd of worldly-minded people, unrepentant sinners who go to hell in a stupor or a dream. Although they profess Christianity, they will turn pale at no guilt and feel no scruple about anything they do. Their consciences are seared, and their understanding is depraved: past all feeling, they have given themselves over to sensuality, greedily practising every kind of impurity, Ephesians 4:19.

They know that there is a God and a judgement day to come; yet despite that, as Hugh says, they eat and sleep as though they had escaped the day of judgement; they play and laugh as though they reigned with God in heaven. For all the sorrow awaiting them, they are as cheerful as if they had escaped every danger and were already in heaven:

—— All fears and inexorable fate He trampled underfoot, and greedy Acheron’s roar.

Those uneducated simpletons and ignorant people who neglect and despise the means of their salvation may march along with them; above all, those Herodian statesmen who accommodate themselves to the times, scheming Machiavellians and hypocrites who make a show of religion but laugh at it in their hearts. Pretended holiness is double wickedness: they are doubly at fault,

conforming themselves to this world, which Paul forbids, and behaving like the planet Mercury: good among the good, bad among the bad. In Rome they do as they see others do; Puritans among Puritans, Papists among Papists; people for every occasion, formalists, double-dealers, lukewarm Laodiceans.