18 SELECTED ESS A YS FROM LA Y SERMONS 



here and there, and the richer citizens who had flown from 

 the pest had returned to their dwelhngs. 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 done for the 

 Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the aututnn 

 of 1666, did for London; and, in September of that year, a 

 heap 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 

 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, accord- 

 ing 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 recur- 

 rence 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. 



