Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/394

380 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, Villani, 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, Cæsar of Heisterbach, 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 steward (cellerarius) of his own monastery was saved from the clutch of a robber by a clap of thunder which, in answer to his prayer, burst suddenly 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 Cæsarius, too, who tells us the story of the priest of Treves, struck by lightning 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 lightning; 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.

This mode of explaining the divine interference more minutely is developed century after century, and we find both Catholics and Protestants 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 thirteenth 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 year.