Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/756

734 put forth the theory that comets are places of punishment for the damned—in fact, "flying hells." Both these theories were soon discredited.

Perhaps this theory can best be met by another which, if not fully established, appears much the better based of the two; namely, that in 1868 the earth passed directly through the tail of a comet, with no deluge, no sound of any wailings of the damned, with slight appearances here and there, only to be detected by the keen sight of the meteorological or astronomical observer. In our own country superstitious ideas regarding comets continued to have some little currency; but their life was short. The tendency shown by Cotton Mather, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, toward acknowledging the victory of science was completed by the utterances of Winthrop, professor at Harvard. In 1759 he published two lectures on comets, and in these he simply and clearly revealed the truth, never scoffing, but reasoning quietly and reverently. In one passage he says, "To be thrown into a panic whenever a comet appears, on account of the ill effects which some few of them might possibly produce, if they were not under proper direction, betrays a weakness unbecoming a reasonable being."

The victory was, indeed, complete. Happily, none of the fears expressed by Conrad Dieterich or Increase Mather were realized. No catastrophe has ensued either to religion or morals. In the realm of religion, the Psalms of David remain no less beautiful, the great utterances of the Hebrew prophets no less powerful; the Sermon on the Mount, "the first commandment and the second which is like unto it," the definition of "pure religion and undefiled," by St. James, appeal no less to the deepest things in the human heart. In the realm of morals, too, serviceable as the idea of fire-brands thrown by the right hand of an avenging God to scare a naughty world might seem, any competent historian must find that the destruction of the old theological cometary theory was followed by moral improvement rather than by deterioration. We have but to compare the general moral tone of society to-day, wretchedly imperfect as it is, with that existing in the time when this superstition had its strongest hold, to make ourselves sure of this. We have only to compare the court of Henry VIII with the court of Victoria, the reign of the late Valois and earlier Bourbon princes with the present French Republic, the period of the Medici and Sforzas and Borgias with the period of Leo XIII and Humbert, the monstrous wickedness of the Thirty Years' War with the ennobling patriotism of the Franco-Prussian struggle, and the