Sermons, (Essays, mttr ^icfatcbs. 



of swift judgment as at tlie time of the Restoration. 

 And it would be our duty to explain once more, and 

 this time not without shame, that we have no reason 

 to believe that it is the improvement of our faith, nor 

 that of our morals, which keeps the plague from our 

 city ; but, again, that it is the improvement of our 

 natural knowledge. 



We have learned that pestilences will only take up 

 their abode among those who have prepared unswept 

 and ungarnished residences for them. Their cities must 

 have narrow, unwatered streets, foul with accumulated 

 garbage. Their houses must be ill-drained, ill-lighted, 

 ill-ventilated. Their subjects must be ill- washed, ill- 

 fed, ill-clothed. The London of 1665 was such a city. 

 The cities of the East, where plague has an enduring 

 dwelling, are such cities. We, in later times, have 

 learned somewhat of Nature, and partly obey her. 

 Because of this partial improvement of our natural 

 knowledge and of that fractional obedience, we have 

 no plague ; because that knowledge is still very imper- 

 fect and that obedience yet incomplete, typhus is our 

 companion and cholera our visitor. But it is not 

 presumptuous to express the belief that, when our 

 knowledge is more complete and our obedience the 

 expression of our knowledge, London will count her 

 centuries of freedom from typhus and cholera, as she 

 now gratefully reckons her two hundred years of 

 ignorance of that plague which swooped upon her 

 thrice in the first half of the seventeenth century. 



Surely, there is nothing in these explanations which 

 is not fully borne out by the facts? Surely, the prin- 

 ciples involved in them are now admitted among the 

 fixed beliefs of all thinking men? Surely, it is true 

 that our countrymen are less subject to fire, famine, 

 pestilence, and all the evils which result from a want 



