The church of St. George, at Leicester, was severely damaged by lightning on the 1st of August, 1846. About 8 o’clock in the evening the rector of the parish saw a vivid streak of light darting with incredible velocity against the upper part of the spire. “For the distance of forty feet on the eastern side, and nearly seventy on the west, the massive stonework of the spire was instantly rent asunder and laid in ruins. Large blocks of stone were hurled in all directions, broken into small fragments, and in some cases, there is reason to believe, reduced to powder. One fragment of considerable size was hurled against the window of a house three hundred feet distant, shattering to pieces the woodwork, and strewing the room within with fine dust and fragments of glass. It has been computed that a hundred tons of stone were, on this occasion, blown to a distance of thirty feet in three seconds. In addition to the shivering of the spire, the pinnacles at the angles of the tower were all more or less damaged, the flying buttresses cracked through and violently shaken, many of the open battlements at the base of the spire knocked away, the roof of the church completely riddled, the roofs of the side entrances destroyed, and the stone staircases of the gallery shattered.”[17] Lightning has been at all times the cause of great damage to property by its power of setting fire to whatever is combustible. Fuller says, in his Church History, that “scarcely a great abbey exists in England which once, at least, has not been burned by lightning from heaven.” He mentions, as examples, the Abbey of Croyland twice burned, the Monastery of Canterbury twice, the Abbey of Peterborough twice; also the Abbey of St. Mary’s, in Yorkshire, the Abbey of Norwich, and several others. Sir William Snow Harris, writing about twenty years ago, tells us that “the number of churches and church spires wholly or partially destroyed by lightning is beyond all belief, and would be too tedious a detail to enter upon. Within a comparatively few years, in 1822 for instance, we find the magnificent Cathedral of Rouen burned, and, so lately as 1850, the beautiful Cathedral of Saragossa, in Spain, struck by lightning during divine service and set on fire. In March of last year a dispatch from our Minister at Brussels, Lord Howard de Walden, dated the 24th of February, was forwarded by Lord Russell to the Royal Society, stating that, on the preceding Sunday, a violent thunderstorm had spread over Belgium; that twelve churches had been struck by lightning; and that three of these fine old buildings had been totally destroyed.”[18]