that in the 14th century, after the great
plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased
proportion of the landed and personal property of every
European country was in the hands of the Church. Well did a
great ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences are the harvests
of the ministers of God."

And so naturally the clergy hold on to their prerogative as banishers
of epidemics. Who knows what day the Lord may see fit to rebuke the
upstart teachers of impious and atheistical inoculation, and scourge
the people back into His fold as in the good old days of Moses and
Aaron? Viscount Amberley, in his immensely learned and half-suppressed
work, "The Analysis of Religious Belief", quotes some missionaries to
the Fiji islanders, concerning the ideas of these benighted heathen on
the subject of a pestilence. It was the work of a "disease-maker", who
was burning images of the people with incantations; so they blew horns
to frighten this disease-maker from his spells. The missionaries
undertook to explain the true cause of the affliction--and thereby
revealed that they stood upon the same intellectual level as the
heathen they were supposed to instruct! It appeared that the natives
had been at war with their neighbors, and the missionaries had
commanded them to desist; they had refused to obey, and God had sent
the epidemic as punishment for savage presumption!

And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the "Book of Common
Prayer" of our most decorous and cultured of churches. I remember as a
little child lying on a bed of sickness, occasioned by the prevalence
in our home of the Southern custom of hot bread three times a day; and
there came an amiable clerical gentleman and recited the service
proper to such pastoral calls: "Take therefore in good part the
visitation of the Lord!" And again, when my mother was ill, I remember
how the clergyman read out in church a prayer for her, specifying all
sickness, "in mind, body or estate". I was thinking only of my mother,
and the meaning of these words passed over my childish head; I did not
realize that the elderly plutocrat in black broadcloth who knelt in
the pew in front of me was invoking the aid of the Almighty so that
his tenements might bring in their rentals promptly; so that his
little "flyer" in cotton might prove successful; so that the children
in his mills might work with greater speed.

Somebody asked Voltaire if you could kill a