Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/745

Rh deaths of Prometheus, Atreus, Hercules, Æsculapius, and Alexander the Great. The Roman legends held that, at the death of Romulus, there was darkness for six hours. The lives of the Cæsars give portents of all three kinds; for, at the death of Julius, the earth was shrouded in darkness, the birth of Augustus was heralded by a star, and the downfall of Nero by a comet. Nor has this mode of thinking ceased in modern times. A similar claim was made at the execution of Charles I, and Increase Mather thought an eclipse in Massachusetts an evidence of the grief of Nature at the death of President Chauncey, of Harvard College. Traces of this feeling have come down to our own times. The beautiful story of the sturdy Connecticut statesman who, when his associates in the General Assembly were alarmed by a general eclipse, and thought it the beginning of the day of judgment, ordered in candles, purposing in any case to be found doing his duty, marks probably the last noteworthy effect of the old belief in the civilized world.

In these beliefs regarding meteors and eclipses there was little calculated to do harm by arousing that superstitious terror which is the worst breeding-bed of cruelty. Far otherwise was it with the beliefs regarding comets. During many centuries they brought terrors which developed the direst superstition and fanaticism; the ancient records of every continent are full of these. One great man, indeed, in the Roman Empire had the scientific instinct and prophetic inspiration to foresee that at some future time the course of comets would be found in accordance with natural law. But this thought of Seneca was soon forgotten; such an isolated utterance could not stand against the mass of superstition which upheld the doctrine that comets are "signs and wonders." The belief that every comet is a ball of fire, flung from the right hand of an angry God to warn the groveling dwellers of earth, was received into the early Church, transmitted through the middle ages to the Reformation period, and in its transmission and reception was made all the more precious by supposed textual proofs from Scripture. The great fathers of the Church committed themselves unreservedly to this doctrine. Tertullian declared that "comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pestilence, war, winds, or heat." Origen insisted that they indicate "catastrophes and the downfall of empires and worlds." The Venerable Bede, so justly dear to the English Church, made in the ninth