evailing theological current was too
strong, and he finally yielded to it in this as in so many other things.

So, too, in the sixteenth century, we have Copernicus refusing to accept
the usual theory, Paracelsus writing to Zwingli against it, and Julius
Caesar Scaliger denouncing it as "ridiculous folly."(97)

(97) As to encyclopedic summaries, see Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum
Naturale, and the various editions of Reisch's Margarita Philosophica.
For Charlemagne's time, see Champion, La Fin du Monde, p. 156; Leopardi,
Errori Popolari, p. 165. As to Albert the Great's question, see Heller,
Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, p. 188. As to scepticism in the sixteenth
century, see Champion, La Fin du Monde, pp. 155, 156; and for Scaliger,
Dudith's book, cited below.

At first this scepticism only aroused the horror of theologians and
increased the vigour of ecclesiastics; both asserted the theological
theory of comets all the more strenuously as based on scriptural truth.
During the sixteenth century France felt the influence of one of her
greatest men on the side of this superstition. Jean Bodin, so far before
his time in political theories, was only thoroughly abreast of it in
religious theories: the same reverence for the mere letter of Scripture
which made him so fatally powerful in supporting the witchcraft
delusion, led him to support this theological theory of comets--but
with a difference: he thought them the souls of men, wandering in space,
bringing famine, pestilence, and war.

Not less strong was the same superstition in England. Based upon
mediaeval theology, it outlived the revival of learning. From a
multitude of examples a few may be selected as typical. Early in the
sixteenth century Polydore Virgil, an ecclesiastic of the unreformed
Church, alludes, in his English History, to the presage of the death of
the Emperor Constantine by a comet as to a simple matter of fact; and
in his work on prodigies he pushes this superstition to its most extreme
point, exhibiting comets as preceding almost every form of calamity.

In 1532, just at the transition period from the old Church to the new,
Cranmer, paving the way to his archbishopric, writes from Germany to
Henry VIII, and says of the comet then visible: "What strange things
these tokens do signify to come hereafter, God knoweth; for they do not
lightly appear but against some great matter."

Twenty years later Bishop Latimer, in an Advent sermon, spea