The Anatomy of Melancholy

Such great evils could religion persuade people to commit.

Not only there, but throughout Europe, we read of bloody battles, racks and breaking wheels, rebellions, factions and conflicts:

—— standards confronting Standards, matching eagles, spears threatening spears,

Invective and strife. They would rather shake hands with a Jew or a Turk, or, as the Spaniards do, allow Moors and Jews to live among them rather than Protestants. “My name,” says Luther, “is more hateful to them than any thief or murderer.”

So it is with all heretics and schismatics whatsoever. None are so passionate and violent in their beliefs and opinions, so obstinate, wilful, defiant, perverse, factious, self-willed and rigid in defending them. They not only persecute and hate but pity all other religions, counting their followers damned and blind, as though they alone were the true Church. They are the true heirs; they own heaven outright by a special grant, and it is entailed upon them and their descendants. Their doctrine is sound—doctrine let down from heaven by a golden rope—and they alone will be saved.

The Jews today are “so incomprehensibly proud and surly,” says Luther, “that they wish to be saved alone, and alone to be hailed as lords of the earth.” And, as Buxtorf adds, “so ignorant and self-willed besides, that among their most learned rabbis you will find nothing but gross foolishness, dreadful hardness of heart and stupendous obstinacy in all their actions, opinions and conduct; yet so zealous that no one alive could be more so, claiming for themselves the title of God’s chosen people.”

So it is with all other superstitious sects: Muslims; pagans in China and Tartary; our ignorant Papists, Anabaptists and Separatists; and the particular churches of Amsterdam. They alone, and no one else, can be saved. Zealous, as Paul says in Romans 10:2, “without knowledge,” they will endure any misery or trouble, suffer and do things that the sun’s rays cannot bear to see. Driven by the Furies of religion, they face every extremity, loss and danger, take any pains, fast, pray, vow chastity and voluntary poverty, abandon everything to follow their idols, and die a thousand deaths,

as some Jews did when facing Pilate’s soldiers in a similar situation, “offering their bared throats and plainly showing,” as Josephus puts it, “that the observance of their ancestral law was dearer to them than life.” Rather than renounce or deny the smallest part of the religion their fathers profess and in which they themselves were brought up, however absurd or ridiculous it may be, they will embrace it. Without further inquiry or examination of its truth, though it be monstrously false, they will believe it. They will take much more trouble to go to hell than we shall to go to heaven.