May we properly say that the pestilence was a calamity visited on that city as a punishment for its sin of neglect?

Men believed that they were surrounded by fiends watching for every opportunity to harm them, that pestilences, storms, eclipses, and famines were the work of the Devil; but they believed as firmly that ecclesiastical rites were capable of coping with these enemies.

" 'Thank Heaven that you do see that,that in a country calling itself civilised and Christian, pestilence should be the peculiar heritage of the poor!

'And yet are not these pestilences a judgment, even on them, for their dirt and profligacy?'

"Wars pestilences and diseases are terrible instructors."