much crowded now as it was then, and
the space which is covered with houses is increased at least fourfold.
What if the sweating-sickness, emphatically called the English disease,
were to show itself again? Can any cause be assigned why it is not as
likely to break out in the nineteenth century as in the fifteenth? What
if your manufactures, according to the ominous opinion which your
greatest physiologist has expressed, were to generate for you new
physical plagues, as they have already produced a moral pestilence
unknown to all preceding ages? What if the small-pox, which you vainly
believed to be subdued, should have assumed a new and more formidable
character; and (as there seems no trifling grounds for apprehending)
instead of being protected by vaccination from its danger, you should
ascertain that inoculation itself affords no certain security?
Visitations of this kind are in the order of nature and of providence.
Physically considered, the likelihood of their recurrence becomes every
year more probable than the last; and looking to the moral government of
the world, was there ever a time when the sins of this kingdom called
more cryingly for chastisement?"

_Montesinos_.--[Greek text]!

_Sir Thomas More_.--I denounce no judgments. But I am reminding you that
there is as much cause for the prayer in your Litany against plague,
pestilence, and famine, as for that which entreats God to deliver you all
from sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion; from all false doctrine,
heresy, and schism. In this, as in all things, it behoves the Christian
to live in a humble and grateful sense of his continual dependence upon
the Almighty: not to rest in a presumptuous confidence upon the improved
state of human knowledge, or the altered course of natural visitations.

_Montesinos_.--Oh, how wholesome it is to receive instruction with a
willing and a humble mind! In attending to your discourse I feel myself
in the healthy state of a pupil, when without one hostile or contrarient
prepossession, he listens to a teacher in whom he has entire confidence.
And I feel also how much better it is that the authority of elder and
wiser intellects should pass even for more than it is worth, than that it
should be undervalued as in these days, and set at nought. When any
person boasts that he is--

"_Nullias addictus jurare in verba magistri_,"

the reason of that boast may easily be perceived; it is because he
thinks, like