which our Holy Mother the Church practices, namely, the ringing of bells when a thunderbolt impends: thence follows a twofold effect, physical and moral—a physical, because the sound variously disturbs and agitates the air, and by agitation disperses the hot exhalations and dispels the thunder; but the moral effect is the more certain, because by the sound the faithful are stirred to pour forth their prayers, by which they win from God the turning away of the thunderbolt."[1] Here we see in this branch of thought, as in so many others, at the close of the seventeenth century, the dawn of rationalism. Father De Angelis now keeps demoniacal influence in the background. Little, indeed, is said of the efficiency of bells in putting to flight the legions of Satan: the wise professor is evidently preparing for that inevitable compromise which we see in the history of every science when it is clear that it can no longer be suppressed by ecclesiastical fulminations.
But, while this apparently harmless doctrine regarding modes of dealing with the powers of the air was developed, there were evolved another theory and a series of practices sanctioned by the Church, which must forever be considered as among the fearful calamities in human history. Indeed, few errors have ever cost so much shedding of innocent blood over such wide territory and during so many generations. Out of the old doctrine—pagan and Christian—of evil agency in atmospheric phenomena, was evolved the belief that certain men, women, and children had secured infernal aid to produce whirlwinds, frosts, floods, and the like.
As early as the ninth century one great churchman, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, struck a heavy blow at this superstition. His work, "Against the Absurd Opinion of the Vulgar touching Hail and Thunder," shows him to have been one of the most devoted apostles of right reason whom human history has known. By argument and ridicule, and at times by a lofty eloquence, he attempted to breast this tide. One passage is of historical significance. He declares: "The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe."[2]
All in vain; the tide of superstition continued to roll on; great theologians developed it and ecclesiastics favored it; until as we near the end of the mediaeval period the infallible voice of Rome is heard accepting it, and clinching this belief into the mind of Christianity. For, in 1437, Pope Eugene IV, by virtue of the teaching power conferred on him by the Almighty, and under the divine guarantee
- ↑ See De Angelis, "Lectiones Meteorol.," "75.
- ↑ For a very interesting statement of Agobard's position and work, with citations from his "Liber contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis," see Poole, "Illustrations of the History of Mediæval Thought," 40, et seq. The works of Agobard may be found in vol. civ of Migne's "Patrol. Lat."
