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.[334]
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.
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