The last and greatest cause of this malady is our own conscience, sense of our sins, and God's anger justly deserved, a guilty conscience for some foul offence formerly committed. "A good conscience is a continual feast," but a galled conscience is as great a torment as can possibly happen, a still-baking oven, another hell. Our conscience, which is a great ledger-book, wherein are written all our offences, a register to lay them up (which those Egyptians in their hieroglyphics expressed by a mill, as well as for the continuance as for the torture of it), grinds out souls with the remembrance of some precedent sins, makes us reflect upon, accuse and condemn our own selves...I know there be many other causes assigned by Zanchius, Musculus, and the rest; as incredulity, infidelity, presumption, ignorance, blindness, ingratitude, discontent, those five grand miseries in Aristotle, ignominy, need, sickness, enmity, death, etc.; but this of conscience is the greatest, torturing the body like an ulcer ...Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
