nd storms. That the author teaches
the agency in these of diabolical powers goes without saying; but this
can only act, he declares, by Divine permission, and the thunderbolt is
always the finger of God, which rarely strikes a man save for his sins,
and the nature of the special sin thus punished may be inferred from the
bodily organs smitten. A few years later, in Protestant Swabia, Pastor
Georg Nuber issued a volume of "weather-sermons," in which he discusses
nearly every sort of elemental disturbances--storms, floods, droughts,
lightning, and hail. These, he says, come direct from God for human
sins, yet no doubt with discrimination, for there are five sins which
God especially punishes with lightning and hail--namely, impenitence,
incredulity, neglect of the repair of churches, fraud in the payment
of tithes to the clergy, and oppression of subordinates, each of which
points he supports with a mass of scriptural texts.(215)

(215) For Majoli, see Dies Can., I, i; for Stengel, see the De judiciis
divinis, vol. ii, pp. 15-61, and especially the example of the impurus
et saltator sacerdos, fulmine castratus, pp. 26, 27. For Nuber, see his
Conciones meteoricae, Ulm, 1661.

This doctrine having become especially precious both to Catholics and to
Protestants, there were issued handbooks of prayers against bad weather:
among these was the Spiritual Thunder and Storm Booklet, produced in
1731 by a Protestant scholar, Stoltzlin, whose three or four hundred
pages of prayer and song, "sighs for use when it lightens fearfully,"
and "cries of anguish when the hailstorm is drawing on," show a
wonderful adaptability to all possible meteorological emergencies. The
preface of this volume is contributed by Prof. Dilherr, pastor of the
great church of St. Sebald at Nuremberg, who, in discussing the Divine
purposes of storms, adds to the three usually assigned--namely, God's
wish to manifest his power, to display his anger, and to drive sinners
to repentance--a fourth, which, he says, is that God may show us "with
what sort of a stormbell he will one day ring in the last judgment."

About the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century we find,
in Switzerland, even the eminent and rational Professor of Mathematics,
Scheuchzer, publishing his Physica Sacra, with the Bible as a basis, and
forced to admit that the elements, in the most literal sense, utter the
voice of God. The same pressure was felt in New England. Typic