Part 5

and again, in “The Taming of the Shrew” to:

“Some Comet or unusual prodigy.”

Spenser in his “Faerie Queene” sings of a woman’s hair loosely dispersed in the wind:

“All as a blazing starre doth farre outcast His heavy beames, and flaming lockes dispredd, At sight whereof the people stand aghast; But the sage Wizzard telles, as he has redd, That it importunes death and doleful drearyhedd.”

John Milton, besides likening Satan to a Comet, as before quoted, also showed that he shared in the belief that the flaming swords mentioned in Holy Writ were Comets:

“High in front advanced The brandish’d sword of God before them blazed Fierce as a Comet.”

The poet Young, in his “Night Thoughts,” aptly writes of the Comet:

“Hast thou ne’er seen the Comet’s flaming light? Th’ illustrious stranger passing, terror sheds On gazing Nations, from his fiery train.”

The poets of other nations have written of Comets in like vein. There is an old German rhyme, sung by German school children even to-day, which has been put into English by Dr. Andrew D. White in his “History of the Doctrine of Comets”:

“Eight things there be a Comet brings, When it on high doth horrid range; Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings, War, Earthquake, Floods and Direful Change.”

This little rhyme was originally put forth for German school children by two Protestant preachers of Basle, Switzerland, at the time of the great Comet of 1618, which heralded the outbreak of the great “Thirty Years’ War.”

These Protestant ministers got their belief in Comets and their evil influence upon mankind not from the Church of Rome, but from the Bible teachings of such great Protestant reformers as Martin Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, John Knox of Scotland, Bishop Jeremy Taylor and John Howe, the great Nonconformist divine.

Martin Luther preached in one of his Advent sermons:

“The heathen write that the Comet may arise from natural causes; but God creates not one that does not foretoken a sure calamity.”

Luther’s friend, Melanchthon, in a letter, declared Comets to be “heralds of Heaven’s wrath.”

Zwingli, in 1531, declared that the great Comet of that year (Halley’s Comet) was sent by God to betoken calamity.

John Knox, preaching in his Scottish kirk at Edinboro, declared that he saw in Comets tokens of the wrath of Heaven.

The great divines of the Church of England,—from Cranmer, Bishop Latimer, Archbishops Spottiswoode and Bramhall, Bishop Jeremy Taylor, down to our own times, clearly preached the doctrine that Comets must be taken as tokens from Heaven.

Thus the Comet of 1572 was pointed out from the pulpits of England and Scotland as a token of Heaven’s wrath and warning at the St. Bartholomew Massacre on the night of August 24, 1572, when thirty thousand Huguenots were murdered in the streets of Paris and elsewhere in France.

Across the sea, in the new Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the great New England divine and President of Harvard College, Increase Mather, on the apparition of the great Comet now known as Halley’s, in 1682, preached on “Heaven’s Wrath Alarm to the World—wherein is shown that fearful sights and signs in the Heavens are the presages of great calamities at hand.”

Increase Mather preached on the text taken from the Book of Revelation: “And the third Angel sounded, and there fell a great Star burning as a Torch, ... and behold the Third Woe cometh quickly.”

In this sermon the great preacher told of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who, when warned of the omen of a Comet, made fun of it, and then died miserably.

So Mather preached: “For the Lord hath fired his beacon in the Heavens among the stars of God there. The fearful sign is not yet out of sight.... Do we not see the sword blazing over us?... Doth God threaten our very Heavens? O pray unto Him, that he would not take away stars and send Comets to succeed them!”

The profound Russian thinker Tolstoy, in his great book “War and Peace,” has written of the flaming Comet of 1811. This was the famous “Comet of Napoleon,” which blazed over Western Europe when Napoleon was gathering his grand army for its disastrous march into Russia and to Moscow.

At Moscow, the ancient capital of Russia, this Comet was observed by anxious thousands. One night there was this talk between a novice nun and the Abbess of her Convent. On their way to vesper service one evening in Moscow the nun suddenly beheld the Comet for the first time and asked: “What is that star?”

The Abbess answered: “It is not a star. It is a Comet.”

“But what is a Comet?” asked the young nun. “I have never heard that word.”

The Abbess then answered: “Comets are signs in Heaven, which God sends before misfortunes.”