Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/623

Rh severity; and, in some of these, offenses generally punished much less severely were visited with death. Every pulpit interpreted the ways of God to man in such seasons so as rather to increase than to diminish the pestilence. The effect of thus seeking supernatural causes rather than natural may be seen in such facts as the death by plague of one fourth of the whole population of the city of Perth in a single year of the fifteenth century; other towns suffering similarly both then and afterward.

Here and there, physicians more wisely inspired endeavored to push sanitary measures, and in 1585 attempts were made to clean the streets of Edinburgh, but the chroniclers tell us that "the magistrates and ministers gave no heed." One sort of calamity, indeed, came in as a mercy—the great fires which swept through the cities, clearing and cleaning them. Though the town council of Edinburgh declared the noted fire of 1700 "a fearful rebuke of God," it was observed that, after it had done its work, disease and death were greatly diminished.

But by those standing in the higher places of thought some glimpses of scientific truth had already been obtained, and attempts at compromise between theology and science in this field began to be made, not only by ecclesiastics, but first of all, as far back as the seventeenth century, by a man of science, eminent both for attainments and character—Robert Boyle. Inspired by the discoveries in other fields, which had swept away so much of theological thought, he could no longer resist the conviction that some epidemics are due, in his own words, "to a tragical concourse of natural causes"; but he argued that some of these may be the result of divine interpositions provoked by human sins. As time went on, great difficulties showed themselves in the way of this compromise—difficulties theological not less than difficulties scientific. To a Catholic it was more and more hard to explain the theological grounds why so many orthodox cities, firm in the faith, were punished, and so many heretical cities spared, and why, in regions devoted to the Church, the poorer people, whose faith in theological fetiches was unquestioning, died in times of pestilence like flies, while skeptics so frequently escaped. Difficulties of the same sort beset devoted Protestants; they, too, might well ask why it was that the devout peasantry in their humble cottages perished, while so much larger a proportion of the more skeptical upper classes were untouched.