3 8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



diseval thinking, and was still further developed by an attempt to 

 specify the particular sins which were thus punished. In the twelfth 

 century the Florentine historian, Yillani, ascribed floods and fires to 

 the "too great pride of the city of Florence and the ingratitude of 

 the citizens toward God," which, "of course," says a recent historian, 

 "meant their insufficient attention to the ceremonies of religion."* 



In the thirteenth century the Cistercian monk, Caesar of Heister- 

 bach, popularized the doctrine in Central Europe. His rich collection 

 of anecdotes for the illustration of religious truths was the favorite 

 recreative reading in the convents for three centuries, and exercised 

 great influence over the thought of the later middle ages ; and in 

 this work he relates several instances of the divine use of lightning, 

 both for rescue and for punishment. Thus he tells us how the stew- 

 ard (ccllerarius) of his own monastery was saved from the clutch of a 

 robber by a clap of thunder which, in answer to his prayer, burst sud- 

 denly from the sky and frightened the bandit from his purpose ; how, 

 in a Saxon theatre, twenty men were struck down, while a priest 

 escaped, not because he was not a greater sinner than the rest, but 

 because the thunderbolt had respect for his profession ! It is Ccesa- 

 rius, too, who tells us the story of the priest of Treves, struck by light- 

 ning in his own church, whither he had gone to ring the bell against 

 the storm, and whose sins were revealed by the course of the light- 

 ning ; for it tore his clothes from him and consumed certain parts 

 of his body, showing that the sins for which he was punished were 

 vanity and unchastity.f 



This mode of explaining the divine interference more minutely is 

 developed century after century, and we find both Catholics and Prot- 

 estants assigning as causes of unpleasant meteorological phenomena 

 whatever appears to them wicked, or even unorthodox. Among the 

 English reformers, Tyndale quotes in this kind of argument the thir- 

 teenth chapter of I. Samuel, showing that, when God gave Israel a 

 king, it thundered and rained. \ Archbishop Whitgift, Bishop Bale, 

 and Bishop Pilkington insisted on the same view.* In Protestant 

 Germany, about the same period, Plieninger took a dislike to the new 

 Gregorian calendar, and published a volume of " Brief Reflections," in 

 which he insisted that the elements had given utterance to God's 

 anger against it, calling attention to the fact that violent storms raged 

 over almost all Germany during the very ten days which the Pope 

 had taken out for the correction of the year, and that great floods 

 began with the first days of the corrected ycar.|| 



* See Trollope, " History of Florence," i, 64. 



f See Caesarius Heisterbacensis, " Dialogus miraculorum," x, c. 28-30. 

 % See Tyndale, ''Doctrinal Treatises," 194 (in Parker Society publications). 



* See Whitgift, " Works," 477-483 ; Bale, " Works," 244, 245 ; and Pilkington, 

 "Works," 177, 536 (both in Parker Society publications). Bishop Bale cites especially 

 Job xxxviii, Ecclesiasticus xiii, and Revelation viii, as supporting the theory. 



J See Janssen, " Gcschichtc des deutschen Tolkcs," v, 350, for Plieninger's words. 



