not be
taken to imply less than its words express, writing, as follows:--

A thousand times I have heard men tell,
That there is joy in Heaven, and pain in hell;
And I accorde well that it is so
But natheless, yet wot I well also,
That there is none doth in this country dwell
That either hath in heaven been or hell,
Or any other way could of it know,
But that he heard, or found it written so,
For by assay may no man proof receive.
But God forbid that men should not believe
More things than they have ever seen with eye!
Men shall not fancy everything a lie
Unless themselves it see, or else it do;
For, God wot, not the less a thing is true,
Though every wight may not it chance to see.

The central thought of these lines, though it afterwards receives a
narrower and more commonplace application, is no other than that which
has been so splendidly expressed by Spenser in the couplet:--

Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is but that which he hath seen?

The NEGATIVE result produced in Chaucer's mind by this firm but placid
way of regarding matters of faith was a distrust of astrology, alchemy,
and all the superstitions which in the "Parson's Tale" are noticed as
condemned by the Church. This distrust on Chaucer's part requires no
further illustration after what has been said elsewhere; it would have
been well for his age if all its children had been as clear-sighted in
these matters as he, to whom the practices connected with these
delusive sciences seemed, and justly so from his point of view, not
less impious than futile. His "Canon Yeoman's Tale," a story of
imposture so vividly dramatic in its catastrophe as to have suggested
to Ben Jonson one of the most effective passages in his comedy "The
Alchemist," concludes with a moral of unmistakeable solemnity against
the sinfulness, as well as uselessness, of "multiplying" (making gold
by the arts of alchemy):--

--Whoso maketh God his adversary,
As for to work anything in contrary
Unto His will, certes ne'er shall he thrive,
Though that he multiply through all his life.

But equally unmistakeable is the POSITIVE side of this frame of mind in
such a passage as the following--which is one of those belonging to
Chaucer himself, and not taken from his French original--in the "Man of
Law's Tale." The narrator is speaking of the voyage of Constance,
after her escape from the massacre in which, at a fe