re the establishment of Christianity: in
Greece and Rome especially, plagues of various sorts were attributed
to the wrath of the gods; in Judea, the scriptural records of various
plagues sent 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 Jahveh 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 offences 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,
the declaration of St. Paul that the gods of antiquity were devils being
cited as its sufficient warrant.(329)

(329) For plague during the Peloponnesian war, see Thucydides, vol. ii,
pp.47-55, and vol. iii, p. 87. For a general statement regarding this
and other plagues in ancient times, see Lucretius, vol. vi, pp. 1090 et
seq.; and for a translation, see vol. i, p. 179, in Munro's edition
of 1886. For early views of sanitary science in Greece and Rome, see
Forster's Inquiry, in The Pamphleteer, vol. xxiv, p. 404. For the
Greek view of the interference of the gods in disease, especially in
pestilence, see Grote's History of Greece, vol. i, pp. 251, 485,
and vol. vi, p. 213; see also Herodotus, lib. iii, c. xxxviii, and
elsewhere. For the Hebrew view of the same interference by the Almighty,
see especially Numbers xi, 4-34; also xvi, 49; I Samuel xxiv; also Psalm
cvi, 29; also the well-known texts in Zechariah and Revelation. For St.
Paul's declaration that the gods of the heathen are devils, see I Cor.
x, 20. As to the earlier origin of th