prayed, thunder sounded, out of the usual course of things, and the whole surrounding atmosphere was covered with clouds. And impetuous and continued rains, bursting down, filled the whole region. The result was a copious and rich fertility wrought by the husbandry of the prayers of Æacus.
"And Samuel called on the Lord," it is said, "and the Lord gave forth His voice, and rain in the day of harvest."[1] Do you see that "He who sendeth His rain on the just and on the unjust"[2] by the subject powers is the one God? And the whole of our Scripture is full of instances of God, in reference to the prayers of the just, hearing and performing each one of their petitions.
Again, the Greeks relate, that in the case of a failure once of the Etesian winds, Aristæus once sacrificed in Ceus to Isthmian Zeus. For there was great devastation, everything being burnt up with the heat in consequence of the winds, which had been wont to refresh the productions of the earth, not blowing, and he easily called them back.
And at Delphi, on the expedition of Xerxes against Greece, the Pythian priestess having made answer:
"O Delphian's, pray the winds, and it will be better,"—
they having erected an altar and performed sacrifice to the winds, had them as their helpers. For, blowing violently around Cape Sepias, they shivered the whole preparations of the Persian expedition. Empedocles of Agrigentum was called "Checker of Winds." Accordingly it is said, that when, on a time, a wind blew from the mountain of Agrigentum, heavy and pestiferous for the inhabitants, and the cause also of barrenness to their wives, he made the wind to cease. Wherefore he himself writes in the lines:
"Thou shalt the might of the unwearied winds make still,
Which rushing to the earth spoil mortals' crops,
And at thy will bring back the avenging blasts."
And they say that he was followed by some that used divinations, and some that had been long vexed by sore diseases.[3]
