The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Muslims extend throughout the Great Turk’s dominions in Europe, Africa and Asia, to the Sharif’s lands in Barbary and his territories in Fez, Sus, Morocco and elsewhere. The Tartar, the Great Mughal and the Shah of Persia, with most of their dominions and subjects, are Muslims today. See how the Devil rages! These are at odds among themselves: some support Ali, some Abu Bakr, Umar or Uthman, those four teachers and successors of Muhammad; and they are subdivided into seventy-two lesser sects, as Leo Africanus reports.

The Jews are scattered everywhere like a band of vagabonds. Their history, present condition and development through time are fully set out by Thomas Jackson, Doctor of Divinity, in his commentary on the Creed. A fifth of the world, and scarcely that, now professes Christ; yet it is so stuffed and interwoven with various superstitions that scarcely a sound part, or any agreement among its members, can be found.

Prester John in Africa, ruler of the Abyssinians or Ethiopians, professes Christianity, but their religion differs so much from ours, with such strange absurdities and ceremonies, such licence and such a mixture of idolatry and paganism, that they retain little more than the bare name of Christianity. They permit polygamy, circumcision, extraordinary fasts, divorce at their own pleasure and so on; and just as the Papists invoke the Virgin Mary, they invoke Thomas Didymus in preference to Christ.

The Greek or Eastern Church is separated from that of the West. As it has four chief patriarchs, so it has four subdivisions, besides the Nestorians, Jacobites, Syrians, Armenians, Georgians and others scattered across Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere: Greece, Wallachia, Circassia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Albania, Illyricum, Slavonia, Croatia, Thrace, Serbia, Rascia, and a scattering among the Tartars.

The Russians, Muscovites and most of that grand duke’s subjects belong to the Greek Church and remain Christians; but, as one writer says, over time they have added many superstitions. In the course of time they have added so many superstitions that they are more half-Christian than anything else. What remains is the Western Church here with us in Europe, but so obscured by various schisms, heresies and superstitions that one hardly knows where to find it.

The Papists have Italy, Spain, Savoy, parts of Germany, France and Poland, and a scattering throughout the rest of Europe. In America they hold all the lands inhabited by Spaniards: New Spain, Golden Castile, Peru and so on. In the East Indies they have the Philippines and some small strongholds around Goa, Malacca, Ceylon, Hormuz and elsewhere, which the Portuguese acquired not long ago; and those land-leaping Jesuits have made attempts in China and Japan, as their annual letters show. In Africa they have Malindi, Kilwa, Mombasa and a few other towns: they drive out one superstition with another.