434 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



upon the earth by the divine fiat as a punishment for sin show 

 the continuance of this mode of thought. Among many examples 

 and intimations of this in our sacred literature, we have the epi- 

 demic which carried off fourteen thousand seven hundred of the 

 children of Israel, and which was only stayed by the prayers and 

 offerings of Aaron, the high priest; the destruction of seventy 

 thousand men in the pestilence by which King David was pun- 

 ished for the numbering of Israel, and which was only stopped 

 when the wrath of God was averted by burnt-offerings ; the plague 

 threatened by the prophet Zechariah, and that delineated in the 

 Apocalypse. From these sources this current of ideas was poured 

 into the early Christian Church, and hence it has been that during 

 nearly twenty centuries since the rise of Christianity, and down 

 to a period within living memory, at the appearance of any pesti- 

 lence the church authorities, instead of devising sanitary meas- 

 ures, have very generally preached the necessity of immediate 

 atonement for offenses against the Almighty. 



This view of the early Church was enriched greatly by a new 

 development of theological thought regarding the powers of Satan 

 and evil angels. For this, the declaration of St. Paul that the 

 gods of antiquity were devils, was cited as sufficient warrant.* 



Moreover, comets, falling stars, and earthquakes were thought 

 upon Scriptural authority to be " signs and wonders " evidences 

 of the divine wrath, heralds of fearful visitations ; and this belief 

 acting powerfully upon the minds of millions of men, did much 

 to create a panic-terror sure to increase the disease wherever it 

 broke forth. 



The main cause of this immense sacrifice of life is now known 

 to have been the want of hygienic precautions, both in the Eastern 

 centers where various plagues were developed, and in the Euro- 

 pean towns through which they spread. And here certain theo- 

 logical reasonings came in to resist the evolution of a proper sani- 

 tary theory. Out of the Orient had been poured into the thinking 

 of western Europe the theological idea that the abasement of man 

 adds to the glory of God ; that indignity to the body may secure 



* For plague during the Peloponnesian wars, see Tbucydides, ii, 47-55, and iii, 87. For 

 a general statement regarding this and other plagues in ancient times, see Lucretius, vi, 

 1090 ct seq.; and for a translation, see vol. i, p. 325, in Munro's edition of 1864. For 

 early views of sanitary science in Greece and Rome, see Forster's Inquiry in the Pamphlet- 

 eer, xxiv, 404. For the Greek view of the interference of the gods in disease, especially in 

 pestilence, see Grote's History of Greece, vol. i, pp. 251 and 485, and vol. vi, p. 213 ; see 

 also Herodotus, lib. iii, xxxiv, and elsewhere. For the Hebrew view of the same inter- 

 ference by the Almighty, see especially Numbers, xi, 4-34 ; also xvi, 49 ; 1 Samuel, xxiv ; 

 also Psalm cvi, 29 ; also the well-known texts in Zechariah and Revelations. For St. Paul's 

 declaration that the gods of the heathen were devils, see 1 Cor., x, 20. As to the earlier 

 origin of the plague in Egypt, see Haeser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin und der epi- 

 demischen Krankheiten, Jena, 1875 '82, vol. iii, pp. 15 et seq. 



