Not by Bread Alone • 243worse time. In the metropolis, ten thousand persons had died the past week,
and smoke from the public fires hung in the air.^21
Symon continued to dwell on God’s providence. Many times he had been
short of cash for his poor parishioners, yet money appeared almost miracu-
lously when he was most desperate, sometimes in a note of credit from a pa-
rishioner peer at court and occasionally “in some corner or another, where I
could not remember that ever I had laid up any.” This set him to thinking
about his parishioners who had come out of their infected houses to talk to
him. How did this happen? And what of his recalling in his memoirs that he
had actually entered infected dwellings to pray with the household? If doc-
tors of physick could do this, why not healers of the soul? “We are in the
hands of God and not of men,” Symon affirmed. He would do what he could
for his parishioners, “who I think would not be so well if I was not here.”^22
Reverend Patrick told Mrs. Gauden of their many fallen clergy friends.
John Allin remembered dissenters who fell.^23 At Saint Paul’s cathedral, the
remaining clergy kept Dean Sancroft current on vacancies in the city pulpits
caused by deaths or flight. Other clergy recommended that he appoint to
permanent posts priests who had filled in for absent rectors “in the midst of
great danger and mortality.” The pleas of these substitute pastors sometimes
came from their own lips. Francis Lewys, after filling in at Saint Botolph
Bishopsgate, where the mortality rose sevenfold to claim thirty-five hundred
victims, sought a city parish of his own with words that revealed his need for
a living and his anxiety in requesting it of someone far above his rank. “I shall
not alledge any argument to prevaile with you,” he wrote to Dean Sancroft.
“I do no more then my duty. It is God preserving me (blessed be his name)
in these more than dismal tymes of mortality, in the very valley of the
shadow of death, to be a surviving miracle of his mercy.”^24