The Anatomy of Melancholy

If they can obtain even a relic of some saint, a picture of the Virgin Mary, idols or the like, that city’s fortune is made for ever; it needs no other support. Now if any of their frauds or juggling tricks is disputed or questioned—if a generous-spirited or zealous Luther, a heroic Luther, as Dithmarus calls him, dares threaten the monks’ bellies—everything is in a blaze, everything in uproar. Demetrius and his associates stand ready to tear him apart to preserve their trades: Great is Diana of the Ephesians! With a mighty shout lasting two hours they will roar and refuse to be pacified.

As for their authority: through private confession, satisfaction, penance, Peter’s keys, thunderings, excommunications and roaring bulls, this high priest of Rome, shaking his Gorgon’s head, has terrified many a simple person’s soul, trampled on majesty itself, and swaggered over almost all Europe for many ages. He still does so to some, keeping them in a servile subjection greater than that in which tyrannical Spaniards ever held the poor Africans they enslaved, or Turks their galley slaves.

The bishop of Rome, says his flatterer Stapleton in On the Greatness of the Church, 2.1, has accomplished without arms what the Roman emperors could never achieve with forty legions of soldiers: deposed kings and crowned them again with his foot, reconciled enemies and chastised at his pleasure, and so on. It is astonishing, says Machiavelli in Florentine Histories, book 1, what servitude King Henry II endured for the death of Thomas Becket, what the pope commanded him to do, and how he submitted to things that in our times a private man would not endure—all through superstition.

Henry IV, deposed from his empire, stood barefoot with his wife at the gates of Canossa. Emperor Frederick was trodden on by Alexander III. Another held Adrian’s stirrup; King John kissed the knees of Pandulph, the pope’s legate, and so on.

What made so many thousands of Christians travel from France, Britain and elsewhere into the Holy Land, spend such enormous sums, go so often on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, crawl and crouch in submission, but servile superstition? What makes them so readily risk their lives, leave their native countries and seek martyrdom in the Indies, but superstition? What makes them become assassins, face death and murder kings, but a false conviction of merit, of canonical or blind obedience, instilled into them, and encouragement through strange illusions and the hope of becoming martyrs and saints? Such fine tricks can the Devil perform through priests, and so skilfully can they play their parts for their own advantage.

And if it were still not enough to deceive mankind through priests and politicians, and torture people’s souls, he has more actors in his tragedy, more irons in the fire: another scene of heretics, factional and ambitious minds, arrogant spirits, schismatics, impostors, false prophets, and blind guides;