lm, "out of His secret
places." As to the hailstorm, he lays great stress upon the plague of
hail sent by the Almighty upon Egypt, and 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. 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."(260)

(260) For Koken, see his Offenbarung Gottes in Wetter, Hildesheim,
c1756; and for the answer to Bacon, see Gretser's De Benedictionibus,
lib. ii, cap. 46.

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, 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 so long exercised the leading theologians of Europe
and America, namely, "Why should the Almight