I. With the Melancholy, the greatest difficulty lieth, in making them capable to receive plain truths. For it will work, not as it is, but as it i• received. And Melancholy doth breed and seed such kind of thoughts, as naturally as a dead Carcass feedeth Vermin: Of forty or fifty Melancholy ⟨p. 3⟩persons that I have to deal with, there is scarce four that are not buried with suggestions to Blasphemous thoughts, against God or the Sacred Scriptures; and scarce two that are not under dismal apprehensions that they are miserable, undone creatures, (except only some that are all carried to conceits of Prophecies, Revelations, and some rare exalting communications of light unto themselves.) This unhappy disease of Melancholy is first seated in the Organs of Imagination and Passion both, that is in the spirits, and thereby in the very Imagining faculty ⟨p. 4⟩it self: Though the Natural parts being without pain or sickness, they will not believe that it is a disease at all. It inclineth them usually to solitariness, to Musing and to dismal thoughts, that they are undone, graceless, hopeless, &c. which because they passionately seem to feel, no words, which silence them, will satisfy them; or if you seem a little to satisfy them to day, its all gone to morrow: For a Melancholy man is like the eye that looketh on all things through a coloured glass, or in an ophthalmie, and seeth them according to the medium.
I. With the Melancholy, the greatest difficulty lyeth, in making them capable to receive plain truths. For it will work, not as it is, but as it i• received. And Melancholy doth breed and seed such kind of thoughts, as naturally as a dead Carkass feedeth Vermine: Of forty or fifty Melancholy ⟨p. 3⟩persons that I have to deal with, there is scarce four that are not burried with suggestions to Blasphemous thoughts, against God or the Sacred Scriptures; and scarce two that are not under dismal apprehensions that they are miserable, undone creatures, (except only some that are all carryed to conceits of Prophecies, Revelations, and some rare exalting communications of light unto themselves.) This unhappy disease of Melancholy is first seated in the Organs of Imagination and Passion both, that is in the spirits, and thereby in the very Imagining faculty ⟨p. 4⟩it self: Though the Natural parts being without pain or sickness, they will not believe that it is a disease at all. It inclineth them usually to solitariness, to Musing and to dismal thoughts, that they are undone, graceless, hopeless, &c. which because they passionately seem to feel, no words, which silence them, will satisfie them; or if you seem a little to satisfie them to day, its all gone to morrow: For a Melancholy man is like the eye that looketh on all things through a coloured glass, or in an ophthalmie, and seeth them according to the medium.
