that Divine wrath was the immediate cause of all physical misfortune. The pestilence was now considered a tremendous judgment for the derelictions of mankind. The ravings of insanity and delirium were declared to be due to possession by demons, only to be relieved by bell, book, and candle, and all the manifold impostures of sacerdotal mummery. During the continuance of the plague the Church prospered amazingly, as she always does prosper by the woes and the misery of mankind. Her gains were far greater than during the Crusades. The zeal of the devout, the superstitious fear and remorse of the wicked, alike paid enormous tribute to her rapacity. Valuable estates were devised by dying penitents to her ministers. Sumptuous cathedrals were raised and endowed by the grateful piety of those who attributed their recovery to the intercession of her saints. Monasteries and chapels were founded by those whom her prayers were supposed to have rescued from the very jaws of death. The portable wealth of empires poured daily into her treasury. But all these sacrifices, all this generosity, all this religious display, afforded no perceptible relief. If they proved anything, they demonstrated effectually the worthlessness of cure by the resorting to shrines and the application of relics. The pestilence ceased its ravages on account of the want of material, not because its progress was stayed by priestly intercession. But while its violence abated and its characteristic symptoms disappeared, its effects remained, and it bequeathed a frightful legacy to posterity. Although respectable medical authority has contended for a different origin of the disease, there can be little doubt in the minds of those who have thoroughly familiarized themselves with the subject that syphilis is either the result of a recrudescent form of leprosy or of a modified morbid condition developed from the plague. Such is a portion of the foul inheritance for which the twentieth century is indebted to the ignorance, the filth, and the superstition of the Middle Ages.