Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/469

Rh the Epistle to the Ephesians. Saint Augustine held the same view as beyond controversy.

During the middle ages this doctrine of the diabolical origin of storms went on gathering strength. Bede had full faith in it, and narrates various anecdotes in support of it. Saint Thomas Aquinas gave it his sanction, saying in his all-authoritative "Summa": "Rains and winds, and whatsoever occurs by local impulse alone, can be caused by demons." "It is," he says, "a dogma of faith that the demons can produce wind, storms, and rain of fire from heaven."

Albert the Great taught the same doctrine, and showed how a certain salve thrown into a spring produced whirlwinds. The great Franciscan—the "seraphic doctor"—Saint Bonaventura, whose services to theology earned him one of the highest places in the Church, and to whom Dante gave special honor in paradise, set upon this belief his high authority. The lives of the saints, and the chronicles of the middle ages, were filled with it. Poetry and painting accepted the idea and developed it. Dante wedded it to verse, and at Venice this thought may still be seen embodied in one of the grand pictures of Bordone: a ship-load of demons is seen approaching Venice in a storm, threatening destruction to the city, but Saint Mark, Saint George, and Saint Nicholas attack the vessel, and disperse the hellish crew.

The popes again and again sanctioned this doctrine, and it was amalgamated with various local superstitions, pious imaginations, and interesting arguments, to strike the fancy of the people at large. A strong argument in favor of a diabolical origin of the thunderbolt was afforded by the eccentricities of its operation. These attracted especial attention in the middle ages, and the popular love of marvel generalized isolated phenomena into rules. Thus, it was said that the lightning strikes the sword in the sheath, gold in the purse, the foot in the shoe, leaving sheath, and purse, and shoe unharmed; that it consumes a human being internally without injuring the skin; that it destroys