702 THE LESSON OF THE LIFE OF HUXLEY. 



This tiiii(> two huiidrocl yt>;irs jit;-(), he tells us in 1866, those of our 

 forefatheis who inhabited this groat and ancient city took breath 

 ])etween the shocks of two fearful calamities; one not (juite past, 

 altiiough its fury had abated; the other to come. 



AVithin a very few yards of the spot on which the address was 

 delivered, so ti'adition runs, that painful and d(Midly malady, the 

 l)laiiue. appeai'cd and smote the people of England with a violence 

 unknown befoi-e. stalking through the narrow streets of old London, 

 and changing their busy hum into a silence broken only by the wailing 

 of the mourners for 50,()(M» dead. 



About this time, in 1666, the death rate had sunk to nearly its 

 noi'iual amount, and the people began to toil at the accustomed round 

 of duty or of pleasure, and the stream of the city life bid fair to flow 

 back into its old bed, with renewed and uninterrupted vigor. 



The newly kindhnl hope was dec(Mtful. The great i)lague, indeed, 

 leturned no more; but what it had done for Londoners, the great 

 tire, which broke out in the autumn of 1666, did for London; and in 

 September of that year a heap of ashes and the indesti'uctible (Miergy 

 of the people were all that remainc^l of the glory of Hve-sixth.s of th(i 

 city within the walls. 



Our forefather's had their own way of accounting for each of these 

 calamities. They submitted to the plague in humility and in penitence, 

 for they believed it to be the judgment of God. But toward the tire 

 they were furiously indignant, interpreting it as the eti'ect of the mal- 

 ice of man — as the work of the Republicans or of the Papists, accord- 

 ing as their prepossessions ran in favor of loyalt}' or of Puritanism. 



It would have fared but ill, says Huxley, with one who, standing 

 where 1 now stiind, should have broached to our ancestors the doc- 

 triiu^ which I now propound to you — that all their hypotheses were 

 alike wrong; that the one thing needful w^as that they should second 

 the efforts of, an insignificant corporation '"for improving natural 

 knowledge," the estal^lishmentof which might have loomed larger than 

 the plague and outshone the glare of the fire to him who had the ^ift 

 of distinguishing between prominent events and important events. 



If the noble first president of the Royal Society could revisit the 

 upper air he would find himself in the midst of a material civilization 

 more different from that of his day than that of the seventeenth was 

 from that of the first centur}'. 



And if his native sagacity had not deserted his ghost he would need 

 no long reflection to discover that all these great ships, these railways, 

 these telegraphs, these factories, these printing presses, without which 

 the whole fabric of modern society would collapse into a mass of 

 stagnant and starving pauperism — that all these pillars of our State 

 are but the ripples and the bubbles upon the surface of that great 

 spiritual stream, the springs of which onl}'^ he and his fellows were 



