NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 381 



Early in the seventeenth century, Majoli, Bishop of Voltoraria, in 

 southern Italy, produced his huge work, "Dies Canicularii," or "Dog- 

 Days," which remained a favorite encyclopaedia in Catholic lands for 

 over a hundred years. Treating of thunder and lightning, he com- 

 pares them to bombs against the wicked, and says that the thunder- 

 bolt is " an exhalation condensed and cooked into stone," and that " it 

 is not to be doubted that, of all instruments of God's vengeance, the 

 thunderbolt is the chief " ; that by means of it Sennacherib and his 

 army were consumed ; that Luther was struck by lightning in his 

 youth as a caution against departing from the Catholic faith ; that 

 blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking are the sins to which this punishment 

 is especially assigned, and he cites the case of Dathan and Abiram.* 

 Fifty years later the Jesuit Stengel developed this line of thought still 

 further in four thick quarto volumes on the judgments of God, adding 

 an elaborate schedule for the use of preachers in the sermons of an 

 entire year. Three chapters were devoted to thunder, lightning, and 

 storms. That the author teaches the agency in these of diabolical 

 powers goes without saying ; but this can only act, he declares, by 

 divine permission, and the thunderbolt is always the finger of God, 

 which rarely strikes a man save for his sins, and the nature of the spe- 

 cial sin thus punished may be inferred from the bodily organs smitten. f 

 A few years later, in Protestant Swabia, Pastor George Nuber issued 

 a whole volume of " weather-sermons," in which he discusses nearly 

 every sort of elemental disturbances storms, floods, droughts, light- 

 ning, and hail. These, he says, come direct from God for human sins, 

 yet no doubt with discrimination, for there are five sins which God 

 especially punishes with lightning and hail, namely, impenitence, in- 

 credulity, neglect of the repair of churches, fraudulence in the pay- 

 ment of tithes to the clergy, and oppression of subordinates, each of 

 which points he supports with a mass of scriptural texts. J 



This doctrine having become especially precious both to Catholics 

 and to Protestants, there were issued hand-books of prayers against 

 bad weather : among these was the " Spiritual Thunder and Storm 

 Booklet," produced in 1731 by a Protestant scholar, Stoltzlin, whose 

 three or four hundred pages of prayer and song, " sighs for use when it 

 lightens fearfully," and " cries of anguish when the hail-storm is draw- 

 ing on," show a wonderful adaptability to all possible meteorological 

 emergencies. The preface of this volume is contributed by Professor 

 Dilherr, pastor of the great church of St. Sebald at Nuremberg, who, 

 in discussing the divine purposes of storms, adds to the three usually 

 assigned namely, God's wish to manifest his power, to display his 

 anger, and to drive sinners to repentance a fourth, which, he says, is 



* See Majoli, " Dies Can.," I, i. 



f See Stengelius, " De judiciis divinis," ii, 15-61, and especially the example of the 

 "impurus et saltator sacerdos, fulmine castratus" (pp. 26, 27). 

 % See Nuber, " Conciones meteoricae" (TTlm, 1661). 



