The Anatomy of Melancholy

Just read superstitious Coster and Gretser's treatise On the Cross; Laurentius Arcturus Fanteus, On the Invocation of Saints; Bellarmine; Delrio, Magical Disquisitions, volume 3, book 6, question 2, section 3; Gregorius Tolosanus, Syntaxis, volume 2, book 8, chapter 24; Strozzi Cicogna, book 4, chapter 9; Thyraeus; and Girolamo Menghi. You will find countless examples of cures of this kind, performed through holy water, relics, crosses, exorcisms, amulets, images, consecrated beads and so forth.

Barradius the Jesuit boldly declares that the faces of Christ and the Virgin Mary would have cured melancholy if someone had gazed steadily upon them. The Spaniard P. Morales, in his book On the Beauty of Jesus and Mary, confirms this on the authority of Carthusianus and I know not whom else: in those days, people troubled in mind commonly said, “Let us go to see the son of Mary”—let us see the son of Mary—just as they now hurry to St Anthony's in Padua or St Hilary's at Poitiers in France.

In a small chamber of that church, St Hilary's bed can still be seen. They bring all the mad people in the district to it and, after some prayers and other ceremonies, lay them down there to sleep, and so they recover. In those parts it is customary to send all their mad people to St Hilary's cradle. They say the same of St Tubery elsewhere.

Gerald of Wales, in The Journey through Wales, chapter 1, tells astonishing stories of St Ciricus's staff, which could cure this and every other disease. Others, as Hospinian observes, say as much of the three kings of Cologne: their names, written on parchment and hung around a patient's neck with the sign of the cross, will produce similar effects.

Read Lippomano or the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, and you will find countless stories; or read these new accounts by our Jesuits in Japan and China, concerning Matteo Ricci, Acosta, Loyola, the life of Xavier, and so on. Jasper the Belgian, a Jesuit, cured a mad woman by hanging St John's Gospel around her neck, and many similar cases are reported. Holy water achieved as much in Japan, and so forth. Nothing is more common in their writings than examples like these.

But we, on the other side, turn to God alone. We say with David, “God is our hope and strength, a readily available help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1). To their catalogue of examples we give only this answer: they are false inventions or diabolical illusions—counterfeit miracles.

We cannot deny that it is customary on St Anthony's day in Padua to bring various mad and demon-possessed people to be cured. Yet we doubt whether they really suffer in this way, or have been prepared by their priests with certain ointments and potions to deceive the common people, as Heldeheim rightly says. Mattioli tells us, in the preface to his commentary on Dioscorides, that the same thing is commonly practised in Bohemia.

But we need not go so far for examples of this kind: a substantial volume has been published here at home on the subject. A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures describes the attempt to win over religious people under the pretence of casting out devils, practised by Father Edmunds, otherwise Weston, a Jesuit, and various Roman priests, his wicked associates. It gives the names, confessions, examinations and so forth of the people supposedly possessed. But these are commonplace tricks, used only to gain credit and money: mere frauds.