iii, in
Migne, Patrolog. Lat., vol. i, p. 701. For the claim regarding
Charles I, see a sermon preached before Charles II, cited by
Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, p. 65. Mather
thought, too, that it might have something to do with the death
of sundry civil functionaries of the colonies; see his Discourse
concerning comets, 1682. For Archbishop Sandy's belief, see his
eighteenth sermon (in Parker Soc. Publications). The story of
Abraham Davenport has been made familiar by the poem of Whittier.
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 belief regarding comets. During many centuries it gave rise
to the direst superstition and fanaticism. The Chaldeans alone
among the ancient peoples generally regarded comets without fear,
and thought them bodies wandering as harmless as fishes in the
sea; the Pythagoreans alone among philosophers seem to have had
a vague idea of them as bodies returning at fixed periods of
time; and in all antiquity, so far as is known, one man alone,
Seneca, had the scientific instinct and prophetic inspiration to
give this idea definite shape, and to declare that the time would
come when comets would be found to move in accordance with
natural law.
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