Improving Natural Knowledge 29 



of duty, or of pleasure; and the stream of city life bid 

 fair to flow back along its old bed, with renewed and 

 uninterrupted vigor. 



The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great 

 plague, indeed, returned no more; but what it had done 5 

 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. 10 



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 15 

 malice of man, as the work of the Republicans, or of 

 the Papists, according as their prepossessions ran in favor 

 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 20 

 peopled and fashionable part of London, should have 

 broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I now pro- 

 pound to you that all their hypotheses were alike wrong; 

 that the plague was no more, in their sense, Divine judg- 

 ment, than the fire was the work of any political, or of 25 

 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 30 

 the craft and subtlety of an enemy. 



And one may picture to oneself how harmoniously the 

 holy cursing of the Puritan of that day would have chimed 



