been spared from that chastisement. You have escaped also from the imminent danger of peace with a military Tyrant, which would inevitably have led to invasion, when he should have been ready to undertake and accomplish that great object of his ambition, and you must have been least prepared and least able to resist him. But if the seeds of civil war should at this time be quickening among you,...if your soil is every where sown with the dragon's teeth, and the fatal crop be at this hour ready to spring up,..the impending evil will be an hundred fold more terrible than those which have been averted; and you will have cause to perceive and acknowledge, that the wrath has been suspended only that it may fall the heavier! May God avert this also! I exclaimed. As for famine, he pursued, that curse will always follow in the train of war: and even now the public tranquillity of England is fearfully dependent upon the seasons. And touching pestilence, you fancy yourselves secure, because the plague has not appeared among you for the last hundred and fifty years; a portion of time, which long as it may seem when compared with the brief term of mortal exist ence, is as nothing in the physical history of the globe. The importation of that scourge is as possible now as it was in former times: and were it once imported, do you suppose it would rage with less violence among the crowded population of your metropolis, than it did before the Fire, or that it would not reach parts of the country which were never infected in any former visitation? On the contrary, its ravages would be more general and more tremendous, for it would inevitably be carried every where. Your provincial cities have doubled and trebled in size; and in London itself, great part of the population is as 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? Μάντι κακῶν ! MONTESINOS. SIR THOMAS MORE. I denounce no judgements. 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 intreats God to deliver you from all 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 Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri, the reason of that boast may easily be perceived; it is because he thinks, like Jupiter, that it would be disparaging his own all-wiseness to swear by any thing but himself. will as little enter into a proud, mind as into a malicious one. But wisdom or a conceited In this sense also it may be said, that he who humbleth himself shall be exalted. SIR THOMAS MORE. It is not implicit assent that I require, but reasonable conviction after calm and sufficient consideration. David was permitted to chuse between the three severest dispensations of God's displeasure, and he made choice of pesti lence as the least dreadful. Ought a reflecting and religious man to be surprized, if some such punishment were dispensed to this country, not less in mercy than in judgement, as the means of averting a more terrible and abiding scourge? An endemic malady, as destructive as the plague, has naturalized itself among your American brethren, and in Spain. You have hitherto escaped it, speaking with reference to secondary causes, merely because it has not yet been imported. But any season may bring it to your own shores; or at any hour it may appear among you home-bred. MONTESINOS. We should have little reason then to boast of our improvements in the science of medicine; for our practitioners at Gibraltar found themselves as unable to stop its progress, or mitigate its symptoms, as the most ignorant empirics in the peninsula. SIR THOMAS MORE. You were at one time near enough that pestilence to feel as if you were within its reach? MONTESINOS. It was in 1800, the year when it first appeared in Andalusia. That summer I fell in at Cintra with a young German, on the way from his own country to his brothers at Cadiz, where they |