[338b]
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.[338c]
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.
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