The Anatomy of Melancholy

Poland is a gathering place for every religion: Samosatans, Socinians, Photinians—now protected in Transylvania and Poland—Arians and Anabaptists can be found there, as in some German cities. Scandinavia is Christian, but, as the Portuguese knight Damião de Góis complains, so mixed with magic and pagan rites and ceremonies that its people might equally well be counted idolaters.

What Tacitus once said of a similar nation is borne out in them: a people subject to superstition and opposed to religion.

Some of them, such as those around Lapland and the Pilapians, remain the Devil’s possession to this day. This wretched people, says my author, has until now been Satan’s possession, a thing most astonishing and lamentable; and what is to be wondered at and pitied is that, if any of them are baptized—as the kings of Sweden work hard to bring about—they die within seven or nine days afterwards. For that reason they can scarcely be brought to Christianity, but continue to worship the Devil, who appears to them daily. In their idolatrous practices, their ancestral gods, whom they devoutly worship, rejoice, and so on. They are very superstitious, like our wild Irish, although the more eminent among them—the kings of Denmark and Sweden themselves, who govern them—are Lutherans.

The remainder are Calvinists and Lutherans, equally mixed in Germany; yet the emperor himself, the dukes of Lorraine and Bavaria, and most of the prince-electors are professed Papists. And although parts of France and Ireland, Great Britain, half the cantons of Switzerland and the Low Countries are Calvinist, and purer than the rest, they are still at odds among themselves and are not free from superstition.

And as the monk Brochard concluded in his description of the Holy Land, after criticizing the Greek Church and setting out its errors, God grant that many follies have not crept in among the Latins, so I say: God grant there are no foolish practices in our Church. Just as dammed water, stopped in one place, breaks out in another, so does superstition.

I say nothing of Anabaptists, Socinians, Brownists, Barrowists, Familists and so on. There is superstition in our prayers, often in our listening to sermons; there are bitter quarrels, denunciations, persecutions and strange notions, besides differences of opinion, schisms, factions and the rest.

But as the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite and his two friends in Job 42:7, his anger was kindled against them because they had not spoken rightly of him, so we may justly say of these schismatics and heretics, however wise they consider themselves, they do not speak rightly of God. They neither speak, think nor write properly of God, as they ought.