it was
hairy, and he bald; but such scoffing produced little permanent effect,
and the prophecy of Seneca was soon forgotten. These and similar
isolated utterances could not stand against the mass of opinion which
upheld the doctrine that comets are "signs and wonders."(92)

(92) For terror caused in Rome by comets, see Pingre, Cometographie, pp.
165, 166. For the Chaldeans, see Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 10
et seq., and p. 181 et seq.; also Pingre, chap. ii. For the Pythagorean
notions, see citations from Plutarch in Costard, History of Astronomy,
p. 283. For Seneca's prediction, see Guillemin, World of Comets
(translated by Glaisher), pp. 4, 5; also Watson, On Comets, p. 126. For
this feeling in antiquity generally, see the preliminary chapters of the
two works last cited.

The belief that every comet is a ball of fire flung from the right hand
of an angry God to warn the grovelling dwellers of earth was received
into the early Church, transmitted through the Middle Ages to the
Reformation period, and in its transmission was made all the more
precious by supposed textual proofs from Scripture. The great fathers of
the Church committed themselves unreservedly to it. In the third century
Origen, perhaps the most influential of the earlier fathers of the
universal Church in all questions between science and faith, insisted
that comets indicate catastrophes and the downfall of empires and
worlds. Bede, so justly revered by the English Church, declared in the
eighth century that "comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pestilence,
war, winds, or heat"; and John of Damascus, his eminent contemporary
in the Eastern Church, took the same view. Rabanus Maurus, the great
teacher of Europe in the ninth century, an authority throughout the
Middle Ages, adopted Bede's opinion fully. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great
light of the universal Church in the thirteenth century, whose works the
Pope now reigning commends as the centre and source of all university
instruction, accepted and handed down the same opinion. The sainted
Albert the Great, the most noted genius of the medieval Church in
natural science, received and developed this theory. These men and
those who followed them founded upon scriptural texts and theological
reasonings a system that for seventeen centuries defied every advance of
thought.(93)

(93) For Origen, se his De Princip., vol. i, p. 7; also Maury, Leg.
pieuses, p. 203, note. For Bede a