338 ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF 



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. 



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 judg- 

 ment 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 Puritanism. 



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

 ing 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 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. 



And one may picture to one's self 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 my imaginary plain dealer had gone on to say 

 that, if the return 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 republicanism, as by that of monarchy. But 

 that the one thing needful for compassing this end was, that 

 the people of England should second the efforts of an insigni- 

 ficant corporation, the establishment of which, a few years 

 before the epoch of the great plague and the great fire, had 

 been as little noticed, as they were conspicuous. 



Some twenty years before the outbreak of the plague a few 

 calm and thoughtful students banded themselves together 

 for the purpose, as they phrased it, of " improving natural 

 knowledge." The ends they proposed to attain cannot be 

 stated more clearly than in the words of one of the founders 

 of the organization : 



