ining 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.(214)

(214) For Tyndale, see his Doctrinal Treatises, p. 194, and for
Whitgift, see his Works, vol. ii, pp. 477-483; Bale, Works, pp.
244, 245; and Pilkington, Works, pp. 177, 536 (all in Parker Society
Publications). Bishop Bale cites especially Job xxxviii, Ecclesiasticus
xiii, and Revelation viii, as supporting the theory. For Plieninger's
words, see Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, vol. v, p. 350.

Early in the seventeenth century, Majoli, Bishop of Voltoraria, in
southern Italy, produced his huge work Dies Canicularii, or Dog Days,
which remained a favourite encyclopedia in Catholic lands for over a
hundred years. Treating of thunder and lightning, he compares them
to bombs against the wicked, and says that the thunderbolt is "an
exhalation condensed and cooked into stone," and that "it is not to be
doubted that, of all instruments of God's vengeance, the thunderbolt is
the chief"; that by means of it Sennacherib and his army were consumed;
that Luther was struck by lightning in his youth as a caution against
departing from the Catholic faith; that blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking
are the sins to which this punishment is especially assigned, and
he cites the case of Dathan and Abiram. Fifty years later the Jesuit
Stengel developed this line of thought still further in four thick
quarto volumes on the judgments of God, adding an elaborate schedule for
the use of preachers in the sermons of an entire year. Three chapters
were devoted to thunder, lightning, a