16 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 



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 Septem- 

 ber of that year, a heap of ashes and the indestruc- 

 tible 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 Puri- 

 tanism. 



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 re- 

 currence 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. 



