The Anatomy of Melancholy

But to return to my former task. The final great torment and trouble of a distressed mind is not so much doubt about election, or the belief that the promises of grace have been smothered and extinguished within them—indeed, entirely blotted out—as the heavy wrath of God that also seizes them, an utterly unbearable pain and grief of heart. They think themselves already damned, suffering the pains of hell and more than words can possibly express. They smell sulphur, speak familiarly with devils, hear and see chimeras, monstrous, unfamiliar shapes, bears, owls, grotesques, black dogs and fiends, hideous cries, terrifying noises, shrieks and pitiful lamentations. They are possessed,

and through inability to endure it they roar and howl, curse, blaspheme, deny God, question his power, renounce religion and are constantly ready to harm themselves by hanging, drowning and so on. Never, since the world began, has any miserable person been in so wretched a condition.

I answer such people with God’s mercy and justice: God’s judgments are hidden, not unjust. His counsel is secret and his judgment just; by it he spares some and severely afflicts others in this life. His judgment is to be worshipped and trembled at, not searched out or investigated by mortals. He has reasons reserved to himself that our frailty cannot grasp. He may punish everyone if he wishes, and justly, for sin. When he does so to some, it is to make way for his mercy, so that they may repent and be saved: to heal and test them, exercise their patience and make them call upon him, confess their sins and pray to him,

as David did in Psalm 119:137: Righteous are you, O Lord, and just are your judgments. As the poor tax collector did in Luke 18:13: Lord, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner. To place confidence and assured hope in him, as Job did in 13:15: Though he kill me, I will trust in him. Burn, cut, kill, O Lord, says Augustine, provided you save my soul: kill, cut to pieces and burn my body, O Lord, to save my soul.

A slight illness, one stroke of affliction or a little misery will often humble someone more, convert him sooner and bring him home to knowledge of himself more effectively than all those exhortatory discourses, the entire theory of philosophy, law, medicine and theology, or a world of instances and examples.

Thus what they regard as so unbearable a scourge is a clear sign of God’s mercy and justice, his love and goodness: they would have perished if they had not perished; had they not been brought to ruin in this way, they would have been ruined for ever.

Many a worldly person is lulled asleep in perverse complacency and foolish presumption, numbed by his sins and entirely insensible to them. I have sinned, he says, and what harm will come to me? Ecclesiasticus 5:4. And, Nonsense! How will God know? So, with a reprobate mind, he goes down to hell. But here, Apollo pulls the ear: God pulls them by the ear through affliction and will bring them to heaven and happiness;