SACRED THEMES

men, unless they suspended the cause on the corruption of the air? If there were another cause, hardly any honorable guise for fleeing would remain for them.

It has the appearance of truth that Hippocrates is read to have purged the air with most fragrant fire, to whom, however, we think one should give as much credence in this matter as to the Romans who, by the command of the Devil, were bringing the idol of Aesculapius to Epidaurus, or to those who ward off the pestilence with their supplications at the temples of the gods. The Angel of the Lord (thus indeed Scripture speaks), standing between heaven and earth with the unsheathed sword of divine vengeance, cannot be burned away in this manner, and the plague cannot be driven off by the help of gods: God, however, can harden the minds of the reprobate in superstitions. Then they argue from experience that many (for they cannot say all) were saved by changing the air, therefore the pestilence is attracted by contact with vitiated air. Firstly, it is not yet certain whether they would have been saved if they had remained under the same air; then, many breathe in it without harm to themselves, which some flee as a kind of hell; then finally, many are seized who have changed the air, either in the very flight, or in that place which they chose to protect their health, just as they are marked by the Lord and handed over to the avenging angel. What experience, therefore, do they boast of, which protests against them? Or even by the testimony of experience itself, so that we may strike them with their own sword, nothing can be proven that the air contributes anything to the cause of death. And so that it may be more evidently established: let those republics be observed which, in separating the sick and catching the breeze,