Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/450

434 upon the earth by the divine fiat as a punishment for sin show the continuance of this mode of thought. Among many examples and intimations of this in our sacred literature, we have the epidemic which carried off fourteen thousand seven hundred of the children of Israel, and which was only stayed by the prayers and offerings of Aaron, the high priest; the destruction of seventy thousand men in the pestilence by which King David was punished for the numbering of Israel, and which was only stopped when the wrath of God was averted by burnt-offerings; the plague threatened by the prophet Zechariah, and that delineated in the Apocalypse. From these sources this current of ideas was poured into the early Christian Church, and hence it has been that during nearly twenty centuries since the rise of Christianity, and down to a period within living memory, at the appearance of any pestilence the church authorities, instead of devising sanitary measures, have very generally preached the necessity of immediate atonement for offenses against the Almighty.

This view of the early Church was enriched greatly by a new development of theological thought regarding the powers of Satan and evil angels. For this, the declaration of St. Paul that the gods of antiquity were devils, was cited as sufficient warrant.

Moreover, comets, falling stars, and earthquakes were thought upon Scriptural authority to be "signs and wonders"—evidences of the divine wrath, heralds of fearful visitations; and this belief acting powerfully upon the minds of millions of men, did much to create a panic-terror sure to increase the disease wherever it broke forth.

The main cause of this immense sacrifice of life is now known to have been the want of hygienic precautions, both in the Eastern centers where various plagues were developed, and in the European towns through which they spread. And here certain theological reasonings came in to resist the evolution of a proper sanitary theory. Out of the Orient had been poured into the thinking of western Europe the theological idea that the abasement of man adds to the glory of God; that indignity to the body may secure