Part 3

So, too, when Jerusalem was to be wasted by a plague, David beheld a Comet in the shape of a flaming sword:

“And David lifted up his eyes and saw the angel of the Lord stand between the earth and the Heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem.” —I. Chron. XXI. 16.

The fall of Satan, some sacred writers hold, was marked by the appearance of a Comet. In Isaiah (XIV. 12) we find:

“How art thou fallen from Heaven, O flaming one, son of the morning!”

John Milton, in his “Paradise Lost,” has fixed this image in immortal verse:

“Satan stood Unterrified, and as a Comet burned That fired the length of Ophiuchus huge In th’ arctic sky, and from its horrid hair, Shakes pestilence and war.”

The Great Deluge, described in Holy Writ, came after the appearance of a mighty Comet (Halley’s Comet), so Dr. William Whiston, Sir Isaac Newton’s successor in the Lucasian chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, set forth in a special treatise. The great French astronomer, Laplace, also reached the same conclusion.

This same Comet (Halley’s Comet) likewise foretold the final fall of the Holy City, Jerusalem, in the year 70 after Christ. This Comet was seen by St. Peter. Josephus in his History of the Jewish Wars recorded the nightly appearance of this Comet over the City of Jerusalem just before the war which ended with the destruction of the Holy City.

“Amongst other warnings,” writes Josephus, who saw this Comet with his own eyes, “a Comet of the kind called sword-shaped, because their tails appear to represent the blade of a sword, was seen above the city for the space of a whole year.”

Josephus at the time rebuked his Jewish countrymen for listening to false prophets while so clear a sign from Heaven was before their very eyes.

This same Comet (Halley’s Comet) reappeared at a critical period of the rule of Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor of Rome. He first beheld his sign from Heaven in the midst of battle as it blazed overhead in the sign of a Cross. With the help of his mother, the sainted Helen, Constantine was moved thereby to turn Christian.

Constantinople, the great capital of the Orient, which owes its name to this same Emperor Constantine, was lost to Christendom in the year 1453, when the Turks overran the great city with fire and sword. This event, it is recorded, was heralded by another appearance of a Comet. Three years later, when the Turks were about to descend upon Belgrade, another Comet (Halley’s Comet) spread consternation throughout Europe.

At that time Pope Calixtus III., on the appearance of this Comet, seeing that evils were impending for the human race, called for prayers that the Almighty would turn these evils upon the Turks, the enemies of the Christian faith.

—Josephus’ “History of Judea.”]

At the same time the Holy Father gave orders for all Church bells to be tolled at noon to remind faithful Christians to pray for those battling against the Turk.

Into the Ave Maria were put the words: “From the Devil, the Turk and the Comet, Good Lord, deliver us!”

Since that time in most Catholic countries the Angelus is still regularly rung at noon. In Italy, even to-day, the cakes sold before the church doors at noon go by the name of Comete.

All the great Fathers of the Church have taught that Comets are to be taken as signs from Heaven.

Baeda, the Venerable, declared in the seventh century in England, that “Comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pestilence, war, winds, or heat.”

John of Damascus, preaching in the same century in the Orient, laid down the same belief.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Light of the Church in the thirteenth century, accepted and handed down the same opinion.

The sainted Albert the Great, the most noted thinker of the Church in the Middle Ages, received and taught the same doctrine.

The teachings of these Church Fathers as to Comets have been commended in our own day by Pope Pius IX.

The great teachers of other religions, likewise, have laid down identical beliefs as to the meaning of Comets.

The sacred books of India are full of awed references to the baleful influence of Comets.

The ancient year books of China, written centuries before white men kept any records, tell of the appearance of Comets and of the disasters they foretold.

The Mohametans and their wise Arab star gazers, when they saw a Comet in the Heavens, knew that it meant war.

The woe of one Comet (Halley’s Comet of 1456), which had the shape of a Turkish scimitar, so the Arab soothsayers foretold, would be turned against their enemies. This was the same Comet which brought such fear to the hearts of Pope Calixtus III. and all his Christian followers.