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."[351]
All in vain; the tide of superstition continued to roll on;
great theologians developed it and ecclesiastics favoured it;
until as we near the end of the medieval 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 against any possible error in the
exercise of it, issued a bull exhorting the inquisitors of
heresy and witchcraft to use greater diligence against the human
agents of the Prince of Darkness, and especially against those
who have the power to produce bad weather.
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