2 lag Strnums, (Essap, atttr |Jcimtos. [i- 



who had flown from the pest had returned to their 

 dwellings. The remnant of the people 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 

 clone for tie 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 inde- 

 structible 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 pre- 

 possessions 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 poli- 

 tical, or of any religious, sect ; but that they were th em- 

 selves 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. 



