SELECTED ESSAYS FROM LAY 

 SERMONS 



ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING 

 NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 



[1866] 



This time two hundred years ago — in the beginning of 

 January, 1666 — those of our forefathers who inhabited 

 this great and ancient city, took breath between the shocks 

 of two fearful calamities: one not quite past, although its 

 fury had abated; the other to come. 



Within a few yards of the very spot on which we are 

 assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly 

 malady, the plague, appeared in the latter months of 1664; 

 and, though no new visitor, smote the people of England, 

 and especially of her capital, with a violence unknown 

 before, in the course of the following year. The hand of a 

 master has pictured what happened in those dismal months; 

 and in that truest of fictions, The History of the Plague 

 Year, Defoe shows death, with every accompaniment of 

 pain and terror, stalking through the narrow streets of old 

 London, and changing their busy hum into a silence broken 

 only by the wailing of the mourners of fifty thousand dead; 

 by the woful denunciations and mad prayers of fanatics; 

 and by the madder yells of despairing profligates. 



But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had sunk to 

 nearly its ordinary amount; a case of plague occurred only 



