e I know not, that some of those bodies were so much
corrupted and so rotten that it was with difficulty they were carried;
and as the carts could not come any nearer than to the Alley Gate in the
High Street, it was so much the more difficult to bring them along;
but I am not certain how many bodies were then left. I am sure that
ordinarily it was not so.

As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to
despair of life and abandon themselves, so this very thing had a strange
effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them bold and
venturous: they were no more shy of one another, or restrained within
doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and began to converse. One
would say to another, 'I do not ask you how you are, or say how I am; it
is certain we shall all go; so 'tis no matter who is all sick or who is
sound'; and so they ran desperately into any place or any company.

As it brought the people into public company, so it was surprising how
it brought them to crowd into the churches. They inquired no more into
whom they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells they met
with, or what condition the people seemed to be in; but, looking upon
themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the churches
without the least caution, and crowded together as if their lives were
of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there.
Indeed, the zeal which they showed in coming, and the earnestness and
affection they showed in their attention to what they heard, made it
manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of God if
they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be
their last.

Nor was it without other strange effects, for it took away, all manner
of prejudice at or scruple about the person whom they found in the
pulpit when they came to the churches. It cannot be doubted but that
many of the ministers of the parish churches were cut off, among others,
in so common and dreadful a calamity; and others had not courage enough
to stand it, but removed into the country as they found means for
escape. As then some parish churches were quite vacant and forsaken,
the people made no scruple of desiring such Dissenters as had been a
few years before deprived of their livings by virtue of the Act of
Parliament called the Act of Uniformity to preach in the churches; nor
did the church ministers in that case make any difficulty of accepting