In this work he relates several instances of the Divine use of lightning, both for rescue and for punishment.

Thus he tells us how the steward (cellerarius) of his own monastery was saved from the clutch of a robber by a clap of thunder which, in answer to his prayer, burst suddenly from the sky and frightened the bandit from his purpose: how, in a Saxon theatre, twenty men were struck down, while a priest escaped, not because he was not a greater sinner than the rest, but because the thunderbolt had respect for his profession! It is Cesarius, too, who tells us the story of the priest of Treves, struck by lightning in his own church, whither he had gone to ring the bell against the storm, and whose sins were revealed by the course of the lightning, for it tore his clothes from him and consumed certain parts of his body, showing that the sins for which he was punished were vanity and unchastity.( 213) (213) See Caesarius Heisterbacensis, Dialogus miraculorum, lib.

x, c.
28-30.
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.