FIRE OF LONDON, THE GREAT, the conflagration that broke out at a baker's shop in Pudding Lane in the small hours of the 2nd of September 1666 and burned, over the four days following, very nearly the whole of the walled City, above thirteen thousand houses and eighty-seven parish churches consumed before a change of wind and the demolition of houses in its path finally checked it at Fetter Lane. This contributor does not think it any want of proper sympathy for the material loss — a loss the City's own committee of survey put, in the pounds of the day, at a sum this Commonwealth would find it hard to raise again even now without some strain — to record that the Commonwealth's own preachers found in so vast a calamity, arriving as it did within a year of a plague that had already carried off some seventy thousand of the same city's people, a text no pulpit of that generation could well have declined to preach from, and that the sermons preached in London that autumn, several of which survive in print and which this contributor has read with the particular attention his own office requires, found in the fire a chastisement the city's own excesses had perhaps not wholly failed to earn.
Providence, as this Commonwealth's own settled theology has since preferred to read the matter, did not stop at chastisement. The rebuilding that followed, planned in its broad lines within a fortnight of the flames' extinction and carried out over the following decade under the general direction of the age's foremost architect, gave London a City of brick and Portland stone in place of the huddled timber the flames had consumed, and raised, upon the ashes of old Paul's, the great domed church that this Commonwealth counts, without much fear of serious contradiction, among the handsomest works of its century. That a fire remembered for its destruction should be remembered also, and in this contributor's own judgment more durably, for the City it left standing in the destruction's place, is precisely the kind of providential accounting this Commonwealth's pulpits have found it easiest, and this contributor would add most proper, to draw.
The fire's own calendar bound it, by an accident no sermon has ever satisfactorily explained away, to the Descent (q.v.) of the following month, the two calamities fusing in popular memory into a single Year of the Burning this Commonwealth still keeps, in its older almanacs, as a season of particular providential trial safely past. This contributor is content to let the two disasters stand, as this Commonwealth has generally preferred to let them stand, as a single chastening episode from which a chastened and rebuilt City, and a chastened and unconquered Commonwealth, emerged within the same twelvemonth rather stronger than either calamity, taken alone, might have been expected to leave them. (W. R. S.)