DE PESTE.

squander their labors and wealth, for once the hand of the Lord has invaded them, they are struck down in such great numbers that even those who did not overstep the boundaries of their duty or the place where they received their station from the Lord, are sometimes struck down in even greater numbers. Perhaps God is avenging their obstinacy because, when they ought to have returned to the One striking them, they fled from Him. Thus, He binds them in their own shackles during their flight, or fixes them in the very place they chose to nourish their health, with a manifest and irrefutable proof that the air contributes nothing to this matter, and that the hand of the Lord is diffused throughout all the air to seize as many as He wills, however much they may study to escape the corruption of the air. Moreover, God openly confounds human prudence when He sends the pestilence, not rarely, in weather by no means opportune for its generation, namely in the middle of a most savage winter. Yet our physicians judge most subtly about which ἀκρασία intemperance/lack of balance of the air it is necessary for the pestilence to arise, and when it is necessary for it not to be able to arise, just as Galen does in book 1 on Hippocrates, book 1.

Therefore, it must be believed most piously that God alone is the cause of the punishments by which our sins are chastised, which He arranges in the abyss of His counsels, and executes with His full power and authority as He wills. Therefore, regarding the pestilence, no sound judgment can be made outside of the Word: in that, however, we are explicitly instructed that the Lord does not singularly invade those whom He has written into His scroll by any motion of natural causes. It also happens that if He does use organic causes, He does not take them from the causes of nature, but...