The Anatomy of Melancholy

I wish all our simoniacal patrons, and those who withhold tithes, would read the judicious tracts written on this subject by Sir Henry Spelman and Sir James Sempill, and the recent, painstaking and learned treatises by Dr Tillesley and Mr Montagu. But even if they read them, it would do little good: “You may shout and confound sea with sky.” Thunder, flash lightning, preach hell and damnation, tell them it is a sin: they will not believe it.

Denounce and terrify them: their consciences are seared, and they pay no attention. Like the adder faced with a charm, they stop their ears. Call them base, irreligious, profane, barbarous, pagans, atheists, Epicureans—as some of them surely are—and, like the pimp in Plautus, they cry, “Bravo! Excellent!” They applaud themselves with that miser, “as soon as I gaze at the money in my chest”. Say what you will: “Money, by whatever means.” Like a dog barking at the moon, your words achieve nothing. Keep your heaven; let them have money.

A base, profane, Epicurean, hypocritical rabble! For my part, let them profess whatever zeal they please, counterfeit religion, blind the world’s eyes, pad themselves out and swell their greatness with the spoils of the Church, and glitter like so many peacocks. My charity is so cold, so deficient in this respect, that I shall never think better of them than that they are rotten at the core, their bones full of Epicurean hypocrisy and atheistical marrow. They are worse than heathens.

For, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus observes in Roman Antiquities, book 7, “First place”, and so on: Greeks and non-Greeks observe all their religious rites and dare not break them for fear of offending their gods. But our simoniacal dealers, our senseless Achans, our stupefied patrons fear neither God nor devil. They find evasions: it is no sin; or the payment is not due “by divine law”; or, if it is a sin, it is no great sin, and so on.

And though they are punished for it daily and plainly see that, as the saying goes, frost and fraud come to foul ends, yet, as Chrysostom pursues the point, “No correction comes from punishment; as though adversity provoked human wickedness, the thing to be punished grows daily.” They become worse rather than better: “They draw anger and defiance from their crime.” The more they are chastised, the more they offend.

But let them take their course: “Gnaw the vines, goat.” Let them go on as they began—it is no sin! Let them rejoice in their security. God’s vengeance will overtake them in the end, and these ill-gotten goods, like an eagle’s feathers, will consume the rest of their property. It is “the gold of Tolosa”, and will produce no better consequences.

“Let them store it safely,” says Chrysostom, “make their arrangements as secret as they please, lock and shut the door: fraud and greed, two most violent thieves, are still shut inside, and a little gain dishonestly acquired will overthrow the rest of their goods.”