These attracted especial attention in the Middle Ages, and the popular love of marvel generalized isolated phenomena into rules.

Thus it was said that the lightning strikes the sword in the sheath, gold in the purse, the foot in the shoe, leaving sheath and purse and shoe unharmed; that it consumes a human being internally without injuring the skin; that it destroys nets in the water, but not on the land; that it kills one man, and leaves untouched another standing beside him; that it can tear through a house and enter the earth without moving a stone from its place; that it injures the heart of a tree, but not the bark; that wine is poisoned by it, while poisons struck by it lose their venom; that a man's hair may be consumed by it and the man be unhurt.( 220) (220) See, for lists of such admiranda, any of the early writers--e.

g., Vincent of Beauvais, Reisch's Margarita, or Eck's Aristotle.
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.( 221) (221) See the Lumen animae, Eichstadt, 1479.
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.