ill by all means quench their neighbour's house
if it be on fire, but that fire of lust which breaks out into such
lamentable flames, they will not take notice of, their own bowels
oftentimes, flesh and blood shall so rage and burn, and they will not see
it: _miserum est_, saith Austin, _seipsum non miserescere_, and they are
miserable in the meantime that cannot pity themselves, the common good of
all, and _per consequens_ their own estates. For let them but consider what
fearful maladies, feral diseases, gross inconveniences, come to both sexes
by this enforced temperance, it troubles me to think of, much more to
relate those frequent abortions and murdering of infants in their nunneries
(read [2656]Kemnisius and others), and notorious fornications, those
Spintrias, Tribadas, Ambubeias, &c., those rapes, incests, adulteries,
mastuprations, sodomies, buggeries of monks and friars. See Bale's
visitation of abbeys, [2657]Mercurialis, Rodericus a Castro, Peter
Forestus, and divers physicians; I know their ordinary apologies and
excuses for these things, _sed viderint Politici, Medici, Theologi_, I
shall more opportunely meet with them [2658]elsewhere.

[2659] "Illius viduae, aut patronum Virginis hujus,
Ne me forte putes, verbum non amplius addam."

MEMB. III.
_Immediate cause of these precedent Symptoms_.

To give some satisfaction to melancholy men that are troubled with these
symptoms, a better means in my judgment cannot be taken, than to show them
the causes whence they proceed; not from devils as they suppose, or that
they are bewitched or forsaken of God, hear or see, &c. as many of them
think, but from natural and inward causes, that so knowing them, they may
better avoid the effects, or at least endure them with more patience. The
most grievous and common symptoms are fear and sorrow, and that without a
cause to the wisest and discreetest men, in this malady not to be avoided.
The reason why they are so, Aetius discusseth at large, _Tetrabib. 2. 2._
in his first problem out of Galen, _lib. 2. de causis sympt. 1._ For Galen
imputeth all to the cold that is black, and thinks that the spirits being
darkened, and the substance of the brain cloudy and dark, all the objects
thereof appear terrible, and the [2660]mind itself, by those dark, obscure,
gross fumes, ascending from black humours, is in continual darkness, fear,
and sorrow; divers terrible monstrous fictions in a thousand shapes and
apparitions oc