These forms of prayer seem to have been the main reliance through the first half of the eighteenth century. But about 1750 began the work of John Howard: among other evidences of saintship he visited the prisons of England, made known their condition to the world, and never rested until they were greatly improved. Then he applied the same benevolent activity to prisons in other countries, in the far East and in southern Europe, and finally laid down his life, a victim to disease contracted on one of his missions of mercy; but the hygienic reforms he began were developed more and more until this fearful blot upon modern civilization was removed.[1]
The same thing was seen in the Protestant colonies of America; but here, while plagues were steadily attributed to divine wrath or satanic malice, there was one case in which it was claimed that such a visitation was due to the divine mercy: the pestilence among the Indians, before the arrival of the Plymouth Colony, was attributed in a notable work of that period to the divine purpose of clearing New England for the heralds of the gospel; on the other hand, the plagues which destroyed the white population were attributed by the same authority to devils and witches. In Increase Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, published at Boston in 1693, we have striking examples of this. The great Puritan divine tells us:
"Plagues are some of those woes, with which the Divil troubles us. It is said of the Israelites, in 1 Cor. 10. 10. They were destroyed of the destroyer. That is, they had the Plague among them. 'Tis the Destroyer, or the Divil, that scatters Plagues about the World: Pestilential and Contagious Diseases, 'tis the Divel, who do's oftentimes Invade us with them. 'Tis no uneasy thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation and Putrefaction, which
- ↑ For Erasmus, see the letter cited in Bascome, History of Epidemic Pestilences, London, 1851. For account of the condition of Queen Elizabeth's presence-chamber, see the same, p. 206. See also the same for attempts at sanitation by Caius, Mead, Pringle, and others. See Baas and various medical authorities. For the plague in London, see Green's History of the English People, chap, ix, sec. 2; and for a more detailed account, see Lingard, History of England, enlarged edition of 1849, vol. ix, p. 107 et seq. For the London 'plague as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking, see A divine Tragedie lately acted, A collection of sundrie memorable examples of God's judgements upon Sabbath Breakers and other like libertines, etc. By that worthy Divine, Mr. Henry Burton, 1641. The book gives fifty-six accounts of Sabbath-breakers sorely punished, generally struck dead, in England, with places, names, and dates. For a general account of the condition of London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the diminution of the plague by the rebuilding of some parts of the city after the great fire, see Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, pp. 592, 593. For the jail-fever, see Lecky, vol. i, pp. 500-503.
