litary, given to contemplation, overmuch solitariness and
meditation. Not that these things (as I said of fasting) are to be
discommended of themselves, but very behoveful in some cases and good:
sobriety and contemplation join our souls to God, as that heathen
[6459]Porphyry can tell us. [6460]"Ecstasy is a taste of future happiness,
by which we are united unto God, a divine melancholy, a spiritual wing,"
Bonaventure terms it, to lift us up to heaven; but as it is abused, a mere
dotage, madness, a cause and symptom of religious melancholy. [6461]"If you
shall at any time see" (saith Guianerius) "a religious person
over-superstitious, too solitary, or much given to fasting, that man will
certainly be melancholy, thou mayst boldly say it, he will be so." P.
Forestus hath almost the same words, and [6462]Cardan _subtil, lib. 18. et
cap. 40. lib. 8. de rerum varietate_, "solitariness, fasting, and that
melancholy humour, are the causes of all hermits' illusions." Lavater, _de
spect. cap. 19. part. 1._ and _part. 1. cap. 10._ puts solitariness a main
cause of such spectrums and apparitions; none, saith he, so melancholy as
monks and hermits, the devil's hath melancholy; [6463]"none so subject to
visions and dotage in this kind, as such as live solitary lives, they hear
and act strange things in their dotage." [6464]Polydore Virgil, _lib. 2.
prodigiis_, "holds that those prophecies and monks' revelations? nuns,
dreams, which they suppose come from God, to proceed wholly _ab instinctu
daemonum_, by the devil's means;" and so those enthusiasts, Anabaptists,
pseudoprophets from the same cause. [6465]Fracastorius, _lib. 2. de
intellect_, will have all your pythonesses, sibyls, and pseudoprophets to
be mere melancholy, so doth Wierus prove, _lib. 1. cap. 8. et l. 3. cap.
7._ and Arculanus in 9 Rhasis, that melancholy is a sole cause, and the
devil together, with fasting and solitariness, of such sibylline
prophecies, if there were ever such, which with [6466]Casaubon and others I
justly except at; for it is not likely that the Spirit of God should ever
reveal such manifest revelations and predictions of Christ, to those
Pythonissae witches, Apollo's priests, the devil's ministers, (they were no
better) and conceal them from his own prophets; for these sibyls set down
all particular circumstances of Christ's coming, and many other future
accidents far more perspicuous and plain than ever any prophet did. But,
howsoever, there be no P