Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/622

604 is the most striking. Nobly and firmly, when so many others even among the regular and secular ecclesiastics fled, he stood by his flock: day and night he was at work in the hospitals, cheering the living, comforting the dying, and doing what was possible for the decent disposal of the dead. In him were united the two great antagonistic currents of religion and of theology. As a theologian he organized processions and expiatory services, which, it must be confessed, rather increased the sway of the disease than diminished it; moreover, he accepted that wild dream of a hysterical nun—the worship of the material, physical sacred heart of Jesus—and was one of the first to consecrate his diocese to it; but, on the other hand, the religious spirit gave in him one of its most beautiful manifestations in that or any other century: justly have the people of Marseilles placed his statue in the midst of their city in an attitude of prayer and blessing.

In every part of Europe and America, down to a recent period, we find pestilences resulting from carelessness or superstition still called "inscrutable providences" As late as the end of the eighteenth century, when great epidemics made fearful havoc in Austria, the main means against them seem to have been the special "witch-doctors"—that is, monks who cast out devils. To seek the aid of physicians was, in the neighborhood of these monastic centers, very generally considered impious, and the enormous death-rate in such neighborhoods was only diminished in the present century when scientific hygiene began to make its way.

The old view of pestilence had also its full course in Calvinistic Scotland—the only difference being that, while in Roman Catholic countries relief was sought by fetiches, gifts, processions, exorcisms, and works of expiation, promoted by priests; in Scotland, after the Reformation, it was sought in fast-days established by Presbyterian elders. Accounts of the filthiness of Scotch cities and villages, as well as of ordinary dwellings, down to a period well within this century, seem monstrous. All that in these days is swept into the sewers, was in those allowed to remain around the houses or thrown into the streets. The old theological, theory that "vain is the hand of man," checked scientific thought and paralyzed sanitary endeavor. The result was natural: between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries thirty notable epidemics swept the country, and some of them carried off multitudes; but as a rule these never suggested sanitary improvement; they were called "visitations," attributed to divine wrath against human sin, and the work of the authorities was to announce the particular sin concerned, and to declaim against it. Amazing theories were thus propounded—theories which led to spasms of