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appendix; also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xliii; also Rambaud. For the resort to witch doctors in Austria against pestilence, down to the end of the eighteenth century, see Biedermann, Deutschland im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert. For the resort to St. Sebastian, see the widespread editions of the Vita et Gesta Sancti Sebastiani, contra pestem patroni, prefaced with commendations from bishops and other high ecclesiastics. The edition in the Cornell University Library is that of Augsburg, 1693. For the reign of filth and pestilence in Scotland, see Charles Rogers, D. D., Social Life in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1884, vol. i, pp. 305-316; see also Buckle's second volume. III. THE TRIUMPH OF SANITARY SCIENCE. But by those standing in the higher places of thought some glimpses of scientific truth had already been obtained, and attempts at compromise between theology and science in this field began to be made, not only by ecclesiastics, but first of all, as far back as the seventeenth century, by a man of science eminent both for attainments and character--Robert Boyle. Inspired by the discoveries in other fields, which had swept away so much of theological thought, he could no longer resist the conviction that some epidemics are due--in his own words--"to a tragical concourse of natural causes"; but he argued that some of these may be the result of Divine interpositions provoked by human sins. As time went on, great difficulties showed themselves in the way of this compromise--difficulties theological not less than difficulties scientific. To a Catholic it was more and more hard to explain the theological grounds why so many orthodox cities, firm in the faith, were punished, and so many heretical cities spared; and why, in regions devoted to the Church, the poorer people, whose faith in theological

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