592 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



little crack, a little spark the same little crack and the 

 same little spark which he had taken a hundred times 

 from his glass tube and the great discovery is complete, 

 his name immortal. 



As the kite dashes through the masses of vapor hurrying 

 over him, he touches the key, and again and again the 

 conquered lightning returns, as it were, a caress even 

 submitting to be caged in the Leyden jar like the common 

 electricity from his rubbed globe. 



And, as the storm abates, the thunder dies away on the 

 horizon, the clouds sweep off toward their ancient enemies, 

 the mountains, and the kite moves lazily in the blue ; 

 while on the thankful, iipturned face of the man gleams 

 the glad sunshine which he had thought never to behold 

 again. 



"It is a dogma of faith that the demons can produce 

 wind, storms, and rain of fire from heaven. The atmo- 

 sphere is a battlefield between angels and devils . . . The 

 aspiring steeples around which cluster the low dwellings 

 of men are to be likened, when the bells in them are ring- 

 ing, to the hen spreading its protecting wings over its 

 chickens : for the tones of the consecrated metal repel the 

 demons and arrest storms and lightning." 



So wrote the Angelic Doctor centuries before the days 

 of Franklin. Those whose minds were still filled with 

 the superstitions of a bygone age, clung to their belief in 

 the efficacy of the church bells, and denounced the light- 

 ning rod as a sacrilege ; nay, even as an awful defiance of 

 Heaven, if it were placed upon a house of worship. Abbe 

 Nollet, forgetting the philosopher in the ecclesiastic, de- 

 clared it to be u as impious to ward off God's lightnings as 

 for a child to resist the chastening rod of the father." In 

 vain it was urged that as the rain fell alike upon the just 

 and unjust, so the thunderbolt shattered with equal im- 

 partiality the steeple of the Christian church or the in in- 





