“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 existence, is as nothing in the physical history of the globe.  The importation of that scourge is 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 everywhere.  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?

Montesinos.—­[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

Sir Thomas More.—­I denounce no judgments.  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 entreats God to deliver you all from 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.