For, misled by this ignorance of human nature, they expected help, from time to time, from various classes of the community, from whom no help (as they ought to have known at first) is to be gotten. Some, as a fact, expected the assistance of the clergy, and especially of the preachers of those denominations who believe that every human being, by the mere fact of his birth into this world, is destined to endless torture after death, unless the preacher can find an opportunity to deliver him therefrom before he dies. They supposed that to such preachers the mortal lives of men would be inexpressibly precious; that any science which held out a prospect of retarding death in the case of “lost millions” would be hailed as a heavenly boon, and would be carried out with the fervour of men who felt that for the soul’s sake no exertion was too great in behalf of the body. A little more reflection would have quashed their vain hope. They would have recollected that each of these preachers was already connected with a congregation; that he had already a hold on them, and they on him; that he was bound to provide for their spiritual wants before going forth to seek for fresh objects of his ministry. They would have recollected that on the old principle (and a very sound one) of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush, the minister of a congregation would feel it his duty, as well as his interest, not to defraud his flock of his labours by spending valuable time on a secular subject like sanitary reform, in the hope of possibly preserving a few human beings, whose souls he might hereafter (and that again would be merely a possibility) benefit. They would have recollected, again, that these congregations are almost exclusively composed of those classes who have little or nothing to fear from epidemics, and (what is even more important) who would have to bear the expenses of sanitary improvements. But so sanguine, so reckless of human conditions had their theories made them, that they actually expected that parish rectors, already burdened with over-work and vestry quarrels—nay, even that preachers who got their bread by pew-rents, and whose life-long struggle was, therefore, to keep those pews filled, and those renters in good humour—should astound the respectable house-owners and ratepayers who sat beneath them by the appalling words: “You, and not the ‘Visitation of God,’ are the cause of epidemics; and of you, now that you are once fairly warned of your responsibility, will your brothers’ blood be required.” Conceive Sanitary Reformers expecting this of “ministers,” let their denomination be what it might—many of the poor men, too, with a wife and seven children! Truly has it been said, that nothing is so cruel as the unreasonableness of a fanatic.