ious imaginations, and
interesting arguments, to strike the fancy of the people at large. A
strong argument in favour 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 nets in the water, but not on the land; that it kills one
man, and leaves untouched another standing beside him; that it can tear
through a house and enter the earth without moving a stone from its
place; that it injures the heart of a tree, but not the bark; that wine
is poisoned by it, while poisons struck by it lose their venom; that a
man's hair may be consumed by it and the man be unhurt.(220)

(220) See, for lists of such admiranda, any of the early writers--e. g.,
Vincent of Beauvais, Reisch's Margarita, or Eck's Aristotle.

These peculiar phenomena, made much of by the allegorizing sermonizers
of the day, were used in moral lessons from every pulpit. Thus the
Carmelite, Matthias Farinator, of Vienna, who at the Pope's own instance
compiled early in the fifteenth century that curious handbook of
illustrative examples for preachers, the Lumen Animae, finds a spiritual
analogue for each of these anomalies.(221)

(221) See the Lumen animae, Eichstadt, 1479.

This doctrine grew, robust and noxious, until, in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, we find its bloom in a multitude
of treatises by the most learned of the Catholic and Protestant divines,
and its fruitage in the torture chambers and on the scaffolds throughout
Christendom. At the Reformation period, and for nearly two hundred years
afterward, Catholics and Protestants vied with each other in promoting
this growth. John Eck, the great opponent of Luther, gave to the
world an annotated edition of Aristotle's Physics, which was long
authoritative in the German universities; and, though the text is free
from this doctrine, the woodcut illustrating the earth's atmosphere
shows most vividly, among the clouds of mid-air, the devils who there
reign supreme.(222)

(222) See Eck, Aristotelis Meteorologica, Augsburg, 1519.

Luther, in the other reli