Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis quae Pestis Dicitur

declining, it cast itself headlong into all kinds of vices by its own voluntary will, while God himself groaned at such great depravity of the human race. Gen. 6. And God seeing that the wickedness of men was great on the earth, and that all the thought of their heart was intent upon evil at all times, it repented him that he had made man on the earth; I will destroy, he said, man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth.

Therefore, as the intolerable iniquity of mortals ascended into the sight of God, he indeed destroyed all mortals by the Cataclysm of the waters, in such a way, however, that he left a seedbed of the new human generation in Noah’s ark. But as the multitude of men grew again, and their malice increased at an equal pace, lest he should utterly destroy those whom he had created in his own image, he established other scourges for them, surely as much harsher as they had more gravely offended the divine mercy by the perpetration of enormous crimes; against which, from the primeval times of the World down to this very day, the just God does not cease to wreak vengeance upon the backs of sinners. Three scourges of God, by which God punishes the sins of men. Indeed, whensoever they, declining from the divine worship and the paths of the divine commandments, have defiled themselves with unbearable sins, he attacks them with a threefold dart: with war, the arrow of the Lord’s fury, he miserably crushes the proud necks of the rulers of the earth; with famine, he strikes in a horrific manner the insatiable avarice of men; with the plague, the foulest contagion of all, he chastises the base luxury of mortals. The divine clemency could surely find no remedy better suited for amending the rebellious spirits of mortals than this very many-sided