Other astrologers blew their star-blasts of similar warning. More startling still were the reported words of a pious monk, which he chanted while in a trance, confirming the astrologers with rhapsodic quotations from Scripture and the Greek mythologists. The popular consternation was somewhat allayed by Pharamella the Moor, whose humanity was stronger than his religious bigotry, and led him to write to the Christian Bishop of Toledo, from the tower on which he was watching the stars, that their prognostications of the “aërial or windy signs” were wrong; but that there would be sufficient force of evil abroad in the atmosphere to produce “scanty vintage, crops of only moderate average, much slaughter by the sword, and many shipwrecks.” The most serious chroniclers of the time still associated as effect and cause the rise and fall of kings and the issue of battles with natural phenomena of comets, eclipses, and storms. Epidemic madness continued to see celestial warriors through the dust of earthly combat, and the ubiquitous presence of the mother of God in churches and cells, in the silence of the roadway, and, in company with Mary Magdalene, trudging along amid bands of pilgrims. Men visited purgatory and returned to describe its burning floor and the writhing shapes of its inhabitants. Indeed, the human mind was not yet sufficiently awake to know that it had been dreaming. Yet here and there were those who threw off the age delusion. The logic of Abélard and the love of liberty voiced by Arnold of Brescia roused more than one of the sleepers, who kept awake and jostled their fellows. Thus the sect of the Waldenses foretokened the rise of modern Protestantism. Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, was afflicted with the rigors of ecclesiastical rule, which robbed more than it protected the people, and with the dogmatic traditions of the church, which were being manipulated as strangling strings about the mind. He threw off these restraints; he devoted his large fortune to the relief of the poor and organized a brotherhood of kindred spirits, who took the name of the Poor Men of Lyons. There had as yet been no attempt to teach the masses the simple religion of Jesus as contained in the Scriptures, Jerome’s Latin Bible of the fourth century being the only translation in use. Waldo secured a rendering of the four Gospels into French. The reading of this by the people led them to dissent from the assumptions of the Roman Church, to question its sacraments, and to deny to the priesthood the sole prerogative of preaching and administering religion. Waldo and his followers claimed liberty to expound the Word of God according to its own rules, and to interpret its precepts in the light of reason and prayer-illuminated conscience.