Hans Zinsser - Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity - famine, earth

Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity - famine, earthquake, and plague - led to mass conversions, another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions.

- Hans Zinsser

source: Hans Zinsser (2011). “Rats, Lice and History”, p.139, Transaction Publishers

topic: Christian, Civilization, Earthquakes, Eruption, Smallpox, Volcanic Eruptions, Bubonic Plague