ABSTRACT
The disaster invades the religious and moral consciousness of the society, becoming one of its focal points. This is reflected by a variety of manifestations, embracing prayers and religious services, moral injunctions, legal enactments, juridical procedure, and the like. Calamities split up the bulk of the population, which in normal times is neither very sinful nor very saintly, into three different groups: first, the moral heroes and intensely religious persons; second, the morally debased and irreligious; third, the remnants of the previous more or less balanced majority, who remain at about the same ethicoreligious level as before. Grave pestilences, like major famines, produce different and even opposite ethico-religious effects in the behavior of different elements of the population concerned: in one case they induce demoralization and irreligiousness; in another they lead to moral and religious exaltation.
