The mode of treatment by means of prayer was, perhaps, intimately connected with the idea that bodily ailments were divinely ordained to make the wrath of God distinctly perceptible by man. This conception of pathological processes was a very ancient one. We meet with it among the Egyptians, and we read in the book of Exodus that God visited upon Pharaoh and his people various bodily afflictions, such as pestilence, black smallpox, death, as in the case of the first-born. Afterward Christianity adopted this view of sickness as providential, and the belief assumed very peculiar forms and dimensions in the middle ages. In those times any disease occurring epidemically was actually considered to be an act of retribution on the part of the divine being, a scourge with which God punished sinful Christians. Thus, for instance, syphilis, which originated in Naples in 1495, during the struggle between the reigning house of Aragon and the French, was instantly declared to be the chastisement of God. The emperor Maximilian declares, in an edict issued August 7, 1495, at Worms: “_Quod novus ille et gravissimus hominum morbus nostris diebus exortus, quem vulgo malum Francicum vocant, post hominum memoriam inauditus sæpe grassetur, quæ nos justissimæ Dei iræ merita debent admonere_” (Gregorovius VII., 386, foot-note 1). But it is very astonishing to observe the causes which aroused the wrath of God so mightily that countless numbers of men were swept away. Thus, for instance, the pious Bishop of Zeeland, Peter Paladius, assures us that miliary fever, that terrible disease which devastated Europe five times from 1486 to 1551, was sent by God, who was angry at the excessive passion for finery which prevailed at that time. Medical science, as founded on theism, assumed menacing forms, where, in the middle ages, it associated itself with magic, but as we shall more exhaustively enlarge upon this point in Chapter IV. we need merely refer here to that part of our work.