68 • Beginningsabout through the forces of nature—the second causes that He himself had
created.^28
Reverend Patrick, groping to make sense of the plague’s invasion of his
wealthy parish, reached for his Bible. He turned to a favorite among David’s
spiritual guides, Psalm 91. We are special creatures of God, the psalmist says,
and should not fear “the arrows [of war] that flee by day, nor the pestilence
which worketh in darkness.” Plague comes from God and cannot be escaped
any more than any other human tragedy. “If we are not saved from the De-
stroying Angel,” the pastor told his congregation, “there is a good reason for
our dying.” To be sure, Patrick believed that plague was a physical malady,
and he relied on his physicians as well as God’s will. Still, he reserved first
place for the divine.^29
Dr. Hodges began at the other end of this spiritual-natural discussion. He
methodically traced the epidemic to “pestilential steams” carried on bales of
cotton or silk from the seat of the infection in Turkey to Holland and then
on Dutch merchandise to England. Soon backtracking, however, he asked
his friends in the religious establishment not to think him an atheist simply
for not first proclaiming what he never doubted, that the first cause was al-
ways that of the Almighty.^30
Medical astrologers also subscribed to the idea of first and second causes
for disease and other human calamities. John Gadbury, while asserting as-
trology to be “the only science that can give the cause and effect of plagues,”
acknowledged God as “the chief and supreme cause.” Gadbury knew how to
cover all possibilities. Before the plague appeared he’d forecast a quiet year
for the capital: “London now / Some petit discontents begin to know!” As the
plague unfolded, he made an artful dodge: “I called them petit because I
wished them so.”^31
Across London Bridge, that interesting combination of alchemist, astrol-
oger, ejected minister, and unlicensed physician, John Allin, believed in di-
vine judgment with a fervor that few could match. The Destroying Angel
was hard at work, he said. The only human recourse was repentance; all was
in God’s hands. Yet there seemed to be a contradiction in this man’s think-
ing: he also leaned toward natural explanations, at least for the spread of
plague. “The infection,” he informed a country friend, “may be taken by the
scent of smelling, and... grosse savour of a foggy infected aire, or the cor-
ruption of an infected person or place.”^32
Then there was Robert Boyle, a bright star in the Royal Society’s galaxy of
scientific experimenters. Robert and his sister Katherine, Lady Ranelagh,
could not help being concerned as the epidemic approached her comfortable