[333]
This mode of explaining 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.[333b]
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.
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