onsiderably beyond exact historical
truth.(211)

(211) For the authorities, pagan and Christian, see the note of
Merivale, in his History of the Romans under the Empire, chap. lxviii.
He refers for still fuller citations to Fynes Clinton's Fasti Rom., p.
24.

As time went on, the fathers developed this view more and more from
various texts in the Jewish and Christian sacred books, substituting for
Jupiter flinging his thunderbolts the Almighty wrapped in thunder and
sending forth his lightnings. Through the Middle Ages this was fostered
until it came to be accepted as a mere truism, entering into all
medieval thinking, and was still further developed by an attempt to
specify the particular sins which were thus punished. Thus even the
rational 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."(212)

(212) See Trollope, History of Florence, vol. i, p. 64.

In the thirteenth century the Cistercian monk, Caesarius of Heisterbach,
popularized the doctrine in central Europe. His rich collection of
anecdotes for the illustration of religious truths was the favourite
recreative reading in the convents for three centuries, and exercised
great influence over the thought of the later Middle Ages. 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 Cesarius, 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.(213)

(213) See Caesarius Heisterbacensis, Dialogus miraculorum, lib. x, c.
28-30.

This mode of expla