er 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,
according as their prepossessions ran in favour of loyalty or of
Puritanism.

It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, standing 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 effort of an insignificant 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:--

"Our business was (precluding matters of