Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/485

Rh clinches all by insisting that God showed at Mount Sinai his purpose to startle the body before impressing the conscience.

While the theory of diabolical agency in storms was thus drooping and dying, very shrewd efforts were made at compromise, such as we always see in the history of every science when its victory is fully in sight. The first of these attempts we have already noted in the effort to explain the efficacy of bells in storms by their simple use in stirring the faithful to prayer, and in the concession made by sundry theologians, and even by the great Lord Bacon himself, that church-bells might, under the sanction of Providence, disperse storms by agitating the air. This gained ground somewhat, though it was resisted by one eminent church authority, who answered shrewdly that, in that case, cannon would be even more pious instruments. Still another argument used in trying to save this part of the theological theory was that the bells were consecrated instruments for this purpose, "like the horns at whose blowing the walls of Jericho fell."

But these compromises were of little avail. In 1766 Father Sterzinger attacked the very groundwork of the whole diabolic theory. He was, of course, bitterly assailed, insulted, and hated; but the Church thought it best not to condemn him. More and more, the "Prince of the power of the air" retreated before the lightning-rod of Franklin. The older Church, while clinging to the old theory theoretically, was finally obliged to confess the supremacy of Franklin's theory practically; for his lightning-rod did what exorcisms, and holy water, and processions, and the Agnus Dei, and the ringing of church-bells, and the rack, and the burning of witches, had failed to do. This was clearly seen, even by the poorest peasants in Eastern France, when they observed that the grand spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which neither the sacredness of the place, nor the bells within it, nor the holy water and relics beneath it, could protect from frequent injuries by lightning, was once and for all protected by Franklin's rod. Then came into the minds of multitudes the answer to the question which had exercised for ages the leading theological minds of Europe, namely," Why should the Almighty strike his own consecrated temples, or suffer Satan to strike them?"

Yet even this practical solution of the great question was not received without opposition. The first lightning-conductor upon a church in England was not put up until 1762, ten years after Franklin's discovery. The spire of Saint Bride's Church in London was greatly injured by lightning in 1750, and in 1764 a storm so wrecked its masonry that it had to be mainly rebuilt; yet for years after this the authorities refused to attach a lightning-rod! The Protestant Cathedral of Saint Paul's in London was not protected until sixteen years after Franklin's discovery, and the tower of the great Protestant church at Hamburg