2 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [u 



began to toil at the accustomed round of duty, or of pleasure ; 

 and the stream of city life bid fair to flow back along its old bed, 

 with renewed and uninterrupted vigour. 



The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great plague, 

 indeed, returned no more; but what it had done for the 

 Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the autumn of 

 1666, did for London; and, in September of that year, a heap 

 of ashes and the indestructible energy of the people were all 

 that remained of the glory of five-sixths of the city within the 

 walls. 



Our forefathers had their own ways 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, towards the fire they were furiously indignant, interpreting 

 it as the effect of the malice of man, as the work of the 

 Republicans, or of the Papists, according as their prepossessions 

 ran in favour of loyalty or of Puritanism. 



It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, standing 

 where I now stand, in what was then a thickly peopled and 

 fashionable part of London, should have broached to our ancestors 

 the doctrine which I now propound to you that all their 

 hypotheses were alike wrong ; that the plague was no more, in 

 their sense, Divine judgment, than the fire was the work of any 

 political, or of any religious, sect ; but that they were themselves 

 the authors of both plague and fire, and that they must look 

 to themselves to prevent the recurrence of calamities, to all 

 appearance so peculiarly beyond the reach of human control so* 

 evidently the result of the wrath of God, or of the craft and 

 subtlety of an enemy. 



And one may picture to one s self how harmoniously the holy 

 cursing of the Puritan of that day would have chimed in with 

 the unholy cursing and the crackling wit of the Rochesters and 

 Sedleys, and with the revilings of the political fanatics, if my 

 imaginary plain dealer had gone on to say that, if the return of 

 such misfortunes were ever rendered impossible, it would not be 



