14 SELECTIONS FROM HUXLEY 



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

 doners, 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 

 5 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 humil- 

 ity and in penitence, for they believed it to be the judgment of 



10 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 favor of loyalty or of Puritanism. 



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



15 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 



20 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 



25 God, or of 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 in with 

 the unholy cursing and the crackling wit of the Rochesters and 

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



30 my imaginary plain dealer had gone on to say that, if the re- 

 turns of such misfortunes were ever rendered impossible, it 

 would not be in virtue of the victory of the faith of Laud, or 

 of that of Milton ; and, as little, by the triumph of republican- 



