[Anon.], ‘The Great Exhibition: A Thanksgiving Service At Exeter Hall’, In The Great Exhibition. Forty-Four Sermons Delivered in Exeter Hall … Selected From The Penny Pulpit ([1851]), Extract

The authors believe that all moving and troubling of the waters is of God. The authors desire, O Lord, to give thee thanks in all that they have seen in the coming together of the nations to this metropolis: in the quietness and tranquillity of large masses of people that no jealousies, and no feelings of hostility have been called / forth. It is well known that in the prospect of the Great Exhibition, fears and forebodings were somewhat extensively felt and proclaimed; in many cases they were entertained, they have no doubt, unreasonably. How memorable the health of the metropolis during the period of the Great Exhibition! It was feared, not perhaps unnaturally, that the influx of such multitudes, among a population already overcrowded, and at the season of the year when the heat was at its height, would generate or aggravate disease.