Lord Palmerston refusing the request of the Scotch clergy that a fast day be appointed to ward off cholera, and advising them to go home and clean their streets,--the devout Emperor William II forbidding prayer-meetings in a similar emergency, on the ground that they led to neglect of practical human means of help,--all this is in striking contrast to the older methods.
Well worthy of note is the ground taken in 1893, at Philadelphia, by an eminent divine of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

The Bishop of Pennsylvania having issued a special call to prayer in order to ward off the cholera, this clergyman refused to respond to the call, declaring that to do so, in the filthy condition of the streets then prevailing in Philadelphia, would be blasphemous.
In summing up the whole subject, we see that in this field, as in so many others, the triumph of scientific thought has gradually done much to evolve in the world not only a theology but also a religious spirit more and more worthy of the goodness of God and of the destiny of man.( 340) (340) On the improvement in sanitation in London and elsewhere in the north of Europe, see the editorial and Report of the Conference on Sanitation at Brighton, given in the London Times of August 27, 1888.
For the best authorities on the general subject in England, see Sir John Simon on English Sanitary Institutions, 1890; also his published Health Reports for 1887, cited in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1891.

See also Parkes's Hygiene, passim.

For the great increase in the mean length of life in France under better hygienic conditions, see Rambaud, La Civilisation contemporaine en France, p.682.For the approach to depopulation at Memphis, under the cesspool system in 1878, see Parkes, Hygiene, American appendix, p.397.For the facts brought out in the investigation of the department of the city of New York by the Committee of the State Senate, of which the present writer was a member, see New York Senate Documents for 1865.

For decrease of death rate in New York city under the new Board of Health, beginning in 1866, and especially among children, see Buck, Hygiene and Popular Health, New York, 1879, vol.ii, p.