come again and again to discovering the key
to the cause and cure of pestilence. It is now a matter of the simplest
elementary knowledge that some of the worst epidemics are conveyed in
water. But this fact seems to have been discovered many times in human
history. In the Peloponnesian war the Athenians asserted that their
enemies had poisoned their cisterns; in the Middle Ages the people
generally declared that the Jews had poisoned their wells; and as late
as the cholera of 1832 the Parisian mob insisted that the water-carriers
who distributed water for drinking purposes from the Seine, polluted as
it was by sewage, had poisoned it, and in some cases murdered them
on this charge: so far did this feeling go that locked covers were
sometimes placed upon the water-buckets. Had not such men as Roger
Bacon and his long line of successors been thwarted by theological
authority,--had not such men as Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, and
Albert the Great been drawn or driven from the paths of science into the
dark, tortuous paths of theology, leading no whither,--the world to-day,
at the end of the nineteenth century, would have arrived at the solution
of great problems and the enjoyment of great results which will only
be reached at the end of the twentieth century, and even in generations
more remote. Diseases like typhoid fever, influenza and pulmonary
consumption, scarlet fever, diphtheria, pneumonia, and la grippe, which
now carry off so many most precious lives, would have long since ceased
to scourge the world.

Still, there is one cause for satisfaction: the law governing the
relation of theology to disease is now well before the world, and it is
seen in the fact that, just in proportion as the world progressed from
the sway of Hippocrates to that of the ages of faith, so it progressed
in the frequency and severity of great pestilences; and that, on the
other hand, just in proportion as the world has receded from that period
when theology was all-pervading and all-controlling, plague after plague
has disappeared, and those remaining have become less and less frequent
and virulent.(339)

(339) For the charge of poisoning water and producing pestilence among
the Greeks, see Grote, History of Greece, vol. vi, p. 213. For a similar
charge against the Jews in the Middle Ages, see various histories
already cited; and for the great popular prejudice against
water-carriers at Paris in recent times, see the larger r