24 SELECTED ESS A YS FROM LA Y SERMONS 



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 ungar- 

 nished residences for them. Their cities must have narrow, 

 un watered 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 Lon- 

 don 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 natu- 

 ral knowledge and of that fractional obedience, we have no 

 plague; because that knowledge is still very imperfect and 

 that obedience yet incomplete, typhoid is our companion 

 and cholera our visitor. But it is not presumptuous to 

 express the belief that, when our knowledge is more com- 

 plete and our obedience the expression of our knowledge, 

 London will count her centuries of freedom from typhoid 

 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 principles 

 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 of command over and due antici- 

 pation of the course of Nature, than were the countrymen 

 of Milton; and health, wealth, and well-being are more 

 abundant with us than with them? But no less certainly 

 is the difference due to the improvement of our knowledge 



