Read Ebook: Comet Lore: Halley's Comet in History and Astronomy by Emerson Edwin

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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 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 spread consternation throughout Europe.

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!"

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 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.

Thus it can be seen that Comets have been held to foretell disaster on one side, and victory on the other.

The Comets which conquerors hailed as their guiding stars, have meant war and bloodshed and disaster to those whom they came to conquer.

The same Comets which shone upon the birth of mighty rulers, have blazed in warning of their death.

Julius Caesar, who was born under a Comet, saw his bloody end foretold by another Comet.

Therefore, Shakespeare in his play "Julius Caesar," makes Calpurnia say to Caesar:

"When beggars die, there are no Comets seen; The Heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."

On the night of Caesar's assassination, when the Comet was seen blazing at its brightest, the Romans said that it had come to bear away the great soul of the murdered Caesar.

At the death of Nero, the Roman Emperor, who persecuted the Christians, a Comet blazed forth again. The Roman historian Suetonius, who wrote the Life of Emperor Nero, thus described this Comet:

"A blazing star, which was commonly held to portend destruction to Kings and Princes, reappeared above the horizon several nights in succession."

Another great Comet reappeared when Attila, the King of the Huns, the "Scourge of God," was overthrown in the greatest battle of Christendom on the Catalaunian fields.

Claudius, a Roman writer of that period, then stated that "a Comet was never seen in the Heavens without implying some dreadful event."

This has ever been the belief of all the great poets of olden time.

Homer, the greatest poet of Ancient Greece, a thousand years before the birth of Christ, sang of:

"The red star, that from his flaming hair Shakes down diseases, pestilence and war."

Virgil, the greatest Roman poet, sang of "the baleful glare of bloody Comets," and again, of "dreadful Comets blazing in the sky."

Tasso, the greatest of Italian poets after Dante, sang thus of Comets in his "Jerusalem Delivered":

Rendered thus by Wiffen into English:

"As with its bloody locks let loose in air Horribly bright, the Comet shows whose shine Plagues the parched World, whose looks the Nations scare, Before whose face States change, and Powers decline, To purple Tyrants all, an inauspicious sign."

The great English poets, on their part, have lifted up their voices to sing of the dire effects of Comets.

Shakespeare, the greatest of them all, abounds in allusions to these dread wandering stars.

Thus he makes Horatio in the first scene of "Hamlet" speak with awe of:

"Stars with trains of fire and dews of blood;

And even the like precurse of fierce events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on."

"A Comet of revenge A prophet to the fall of all our foes";

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:

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