ld in eternal honour--the physicians from Paris and
Montpellier; the mayor of the city, and one or two of his associates;
but, above all, the Chevalier Roze and Bishop Belzunce. The history of
these men may well make us glory in human nature; but in all this noble
group the figure of Belzunce 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 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 grovelling before the image of St.
Sebastian and calling in special "witch-doctors"--that is, monks who
cast out devils. To seek the aid of physicians was, in the neighbourhood
of these monastic centres, very generally considered impious, and the
enormous death rate in such neighbourhoods 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,
burnings of witches, and other works of expiation, promoted by priests;
in Scotland, after the Reformation, it was sought in fast-days and
executions of witches promoted by Protestant elders. Accounts of the
filthiness of Scotch cities and villages, down to a period well within
this century, seem monstrous. All that in th