DEFOE'S JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR PT 8

PART 8  H.F. ends his account by reflecting on the return to old animosities once the disaster of the plague was over & concludes that the outbreak itself was "all supernatural". 

It was not the least of our misfortunes that with the ceasing of infection there did not cease the spirit of strife and contention, slander and reproach, which had been the troubler of the nation’s peace before.

As the late Act of Indemnity had laid asleep the old animosities the Government had recommended family and personal peace upon all occasions to the whole nation. But it could not be obtained.

Particularly after the plague ceased in London, where anyone that had seen the condition of the people would have thought they would come together with a new spirit at last. But the quarrel remained. The Church and the Presbyterians were incompatible.

The dissenting ministers who had supplied the pulpits deserted by their regular incumbents were now fallen upon and harassed once more with the penal laws. Even those of us of the Church thought this was very hard.

On the other hand the Dissenters reproached ministers of the Church with going away, abandoning the people in their danger. This we could by no means approve for the plague is a formidable enemy armed with terrors that not every man is fortified to resist.

It ought to be recorded to the honour of all useful people who ventured their lives in discharge of their duty that all such as stayed did it to the last degree & a great number of them did not only venture but lose their lives on that sad occasion.

However such a time as this of 1665 is not to be paralleled in history. I recommend it to all good people to look back and reflect duly on the terrors of the time & whoever does so will see that no ordinary strength could support it.

It pleased God by the continuing winter weather to so restore the health of the city that by the February following we reckoned the distemper quite ceased. It was evidently from the secret invisible hand of Him that sent this disease as a judgement.

The disease was now enervated & its malignity spent & even those physicians who had the least religion in them were obliged to acknowledge that it was all supernatural, that it was extraordinary & that no account could be given of it.

But I must own that for the generality of the people it might be said of them as it was of the children of Israel when they passed the Red Sea & saw the Egyptians overwhelmed in the water: viz. that they sang His praise but soon forgot His works.

I can go no further here. I should be counted censorious if I should enter into the unpleasant work of reflecting, whatever the cause for it, upon the unthankfulness, & return of all manner of wickedness among us, which I was so much an eye-witness of myself.

I shall conclude with a coarse but sincere stanza of my own, which I placed at the end of my memorandums in the year they were written.

A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away, yet I alive!

So ends Daniel Defoe’s novelisation of the Great Plague of 1665, twitterised in 160 episodes.