Toads

For toads, see also the curation, What Is a Mountebank?, for Two Mountebanks72.

This ballad, presented in the voice of the toad, points out that the sinful human’s poison is worse than the toad’s, because the toad’s poison can kill the body but not the soul.

Sin’s Discovery by the Emblem of a Toad

Poor man, why, with disdain dost look on me?
Thyself more vile, by Sin, why dost not see?
A toad I am, yet serve God in my kind,
Accomplishing those ends to me assigned.
My place I keep, where God appointed me,
From Earth that venom I suck up, which thee
And beasts would hurt: and yet my poison’s good
For medicines, were it rightly understood,
And with this poison, though myself I fill,
It’s that which can the body only kill,
And makes me loathsome unto mortal eyes
But with me all my shame and sorrow dies.
But thou rebell’st against God’s majesty,
And serv’st the Devil, His damned enemy.
With filthy Lusts (worst Poyson) filled thou art,
Which makes Jehovah loathe thee with his heart

Thy poison’s worse, ten thousand times, than mine,
Which only does the body kill; but thine
The soul, likewise. And if in sin thou die,
Death does not end thy shame and misery.
It then begins, which once but felt and seen,
A loathsome Toad, like me, thou’lt wish thoud’st been;
Then thou wilt find thy state, than mine far worse,
Since ugly sin made Christ become a curse,
And that man’s sin caused all that misery,
Which Christ endured from cratch* to **crused-tree.
*creche or crib; **cross
Yea, that each willful, unrepented sin,
Does horror here and hell hereafter win.
Sin, therefore, worse than plagues, death, hell, the devil,
Cause of all ill, hate, as the greatest evil,
And if thou (ere) wilt enter Heaven’s straight gate,
Let sins, not toads, be object of thy hate.

Source for text: “Sin’s Discovery, by the Emblem of a Toad,” Huntington Library HEH 479696, English Broadside Ballad Archive 32567 [modernized].

A man standing before a house identified as “The Sinner's Seat” converses with a toad, while heavenly figures look down from on high and a demon feeds people into the hell mouth below.

Source: Woodcut from the ballad “Sin’s Discovery, by the Emblem of a Toad” (1673). Wellcome Library no. 39064i, Wellcome Collection CC BY.