The Anatomy of Melancholy

Their intolerable greed bears witness: their strange forgeries, absurdities, follies, wicked subtleties, frauds, illusions, new doctrines, paradoxes, traditions and false miracles, which they have continually fabricated to enslave, ensnare and subjugate people, maintaining their own possessions. At one time, through bulls, pardons, indulgences, their doctrine that good works earn merit, and hope of heaven, they have so fleeced ordinary people and spurred on this willing, superstitious horse that he runs himself blind and becomes an ass to carry burdens.

They have so enlarged Peter’s patrimony that, from a poor bishop, he has become King of kings, Lord of lords, a demigod—as his canon lawyers, Felinus and the rest, make him—above God himself. In wealth and worldly possessions he is not inferior to many kings; his cardinals are the peers of princes.

In almost every kingdom, abbots, priors, monks, friars and the rest of his clergy have gathered a third, a half, and in some places everything into their hands. Three prince-electors in Germany are bishops, besides those of Magdeburg, Speyer, Salzburg, Bremen, Bamberg, and so on.

In France, as Bodin tells us in his book On the Commonwealth, their revenues amount to twelve million three hundred thousand livres; and of the twelve parts of France’s revenues, the Church possesses seven. The Jesuits, a new sect begun in this age, have three or four hundred colleges in Europe, according to the reckoning of Middendorpius and Pelargus, and greater revenues than many princes. In France, as Arnoldus shows, within thirty years they have acquired two hundred thousand pounds a year: £200,000. I say nothing of their other orders.

In England, as Armachanus demonstrates, we have had more than thirty thousand friars at once. As Speed gathers from Leland and others, there were almost six hundred religious houses, with nearly two hundred thousand pounds in revenue at the old rental valuation, besides images of gold and silver, precious metal vessels, furniture, goods and ornaments. Weever calculates these possessions and estimates their worth at the dissolution of the abbeys at a million in gold.

How many towns in every kingdom has superstition enriched? What heaps of money their Mass-priests have amassed through musty relics, images and idolatry, and what sums they have scraped together through their other tricks! Loreto in Italy, Walsingham in England in those days—where everything gleams with gold, as Erasmus says—Saint Thomas’s shrine, and the rest, can bear witness. Delphi, once so renowned in Greece for Apollo’s oracle; Delos, a common meeting place and marketplace protected by religion alone; and Dodona, whose fame and wealth were sustained by religion, were neither so rich nor so famous.