y course of natural causes; and
He is pleased to act by those natural causes as the ordinary means,
excepting and reserving to Himself nevertheless a power to act in a
supernatural way when He sees occasion. Now 'tis evident that in the
case of an infection there is no apparent extraordinary occasion for
supernatural operation, but the ordinary course of things appears
sufficiently armed, and made capable of all the effects that Heaven
usually directs by a contagion. Among these causes and effects, this of
the secret conveyance of infection, imperceptible and unavoidable, is
more than sufficient to execute the fierceness of Divine vengeance,
without putting it upon supernaturals and miracle.

The acute penetrating nature of the disease itself was such, and the
infection was received so imperceptibly, that the most exact caution
could not secure us while in the place. But I must be allowed to
believe--and I have so many examples fresh in my memory to convince me
of it, that I think none can resist their evidence--I say, I must be
allowed to believe that no one in this whole nation ever received
the sickness or infection but who received it in the ordinary way of
infection from somebody, or the clothes or touch or stench of somebody
that was infected before.

The manner of its coming first to London proves this also, viz., by
goods brought over from Holland, and brought thither from the Levant;
the first breaking of it out in a house in Long Acre where those goods
were carried and first opened; its spreading from that house to other
houses by the visible unwary conversing with those who were sick; and
the infecting the parish officers who were employed about the persons
dead, and the like. These are known authorities for this great
foundation point--that it went on and proceeded from person to person
and from house to house, and no otherwise. In the first house that was
infected there died four persons. A neighbour, hearing the mistress of
the first house was sick, went to visit her, and went home and gave the
distemper to her family, and died, and all her household. A minister,
called to pray with the first sick person in the second house, was said
to sicken immediately and die with several more in his house. Then
the physicians began to consider, for they did not at first dream of a
general contagion. But the physicians being sent to inspect the bodies,
they assured the people that it was neither more or less than the