moral and intellectual capacity, you well know how little of the light of knowledge and of revelation has reached them. They are still in darkness, and in the shadow of death!

MONTESINOS.

I perceive your drift; and perceive also that when we understand each other, there is likely to be little difference between us. And I beseech you, do not suppose that I am disputing for the sake of disputation; with that pernicious habit I was never infected, and I have seen too many mournful proofs of its perilous consequences. Toward any person it is injudicious and offensive; toward you it would be irreverent. Your position is undeniable. Were society to be stationary at its present point, the bulk of the people would, on the whole, have lost rather than gained by the alterations which have taken place during the last thousand years. Yet this must be remembered, that in common with all ranks they are exempted from those dreadful visitations of war, pestilence, and famine, by which these kingdoms were so frequently afflicted of old.

The countenance of my companion changed upon this, to an expression of judicial severity which struck me with awe. Exempted from

these visitations! he exclaimed; Mortal man! creature of a day, what art thou, that thou shouldst presume upon any such exemption? Is it from a trust in your own deserts, or a reliance upon the forbearance and long-suffering of the Almighty, that this vain confidence arises?

I was silent.

My friend, he resumed, in a milder tone, but with a melancholy manner, your own individual health and happiness are scarcely more precarious than this fancied security. By the mercy of God, twice during the short space of your life, England has been spared from the horrors of invasion, which might with ease have been effected during the American war, when the enemy's fleet swept the channel, and insulted your very ports, and which was more than once seriously intended during the late long contest. The invaders would indeed have found their graves in that soil which they came to subdue: but before they could have been overcome, the atrocious threat of Buonaparte's General might have been in great part realized, that though he could not answer for effecting the conquest of England, he would engage to destroy its prosperity for a century to come. You have

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

is

ence, is as nothing in the physical history of the globe. The importation of that Scourge 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.