This I take to be the reason which makes so many people talk of the air being corrupted and infected, and that they need not be cautious of whom they converse with, for that the contagion was in the air.  I have seen them in strange agitations and surprises on this account.  ’I have never come near any infected body’, says the disturbed person; ’I have conversed with none but sound, healthy people, and yet I have gotten the distemper!’ ‘I am sure I am struck from Heaven’, says another, and he falls to the serious part.  Again, the first goes on exclaiming, ’I have come near no infection or any infected person; I am sure it is the air.  We draw in death when we breathe, and therefore ’tis the hand of God; there is no withstanding it.’  And this at last made many people, being hardened to the danger, grow less concerned at it; and less cautious towards the latter end of the time, and when it was come to its height, than they were at first.  Then, with a kind of a Turkish predestinarianism, they would say, if it pleased God to strike them, it was all one whether they went abroad or stayed at home; they could not escape it, and therefore they went boldly about, even into infected houses and infected company; visited sick people; and, in short, lay in the beds with their wives or relations when they were infected.  And what was the consequence, but the same that is the consequence in Turkey, and in those countries where they do those things—­namely, that they were infected too, and died by hundreds and thousands?

I would be far from lessening the awe of the judgements of God and the reverence to His providence which ought always to be on our minds on such occasions as these.  Doubtless the visitation itself is a stroke from Heaven upon a city, or country, or nation where it falls; a messenger of His vengeance, and a loud call to that nation or country or city to humiliation and repentance, according to that of the prophet Jeremiah (xviii. 7, 8):  ’At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; if that nation against whom I have pronounced turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.’  Now to prompt due impressions of the awe of God on the minds of men on such occasions, and not to lessen them, it is that I have left those minutes upon record.

I say, therefore, I reflect upon no man for putting the reason of those things upon the immediate hand of God, and the appointment and direction of His providence; nay, on the contrary, there were many wonderful deliverances of persons from infection, and deliverances of persons when infected, which intimate singular and remarkable providence in the particular instances to which they refer; and I esteem my own deliverance to be one next to miraculous, and do record it with thankfulness.