arnestly on the subject of
this warning.

Nor were the interpreters of the comet's message content with simple
prose. At the appearance of the comet of 1618, Grasser and Gross,
pastors and doctors of theology at Basle, put forth a collection
of doggerel rhymes to fasten the orthodox theory into the minds of
school-children and peasants. One of these may be translated:

"I am a Rod in God's right hand threatening the German and foreign land."

Others for a similar purpose taught:

"Eight things there be a Comet brings, When it on high doth horrid
range: Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings, War, Earthquakes,
Floods, and Direful Change."

Great ingenuity was shown in meeting the advance of science, in the
universities and schools, with new texts of Scripture; and Stephen
Spleiss, Rector of the Gymnasium at Schaffhausen, got great credit by
teaching that in the vision of Jeremiah the "almond rod" was a tailed
comet, and the "seething pot" a bearded one.(111)

(111) For Erni, see Wolf, Gesch. d. Astronomie, p. 239. For Grassner and
Gross, see their Christenliches Bedenken... von dem erschrockenlichen
Cometen, etc., Zurich, 1664. For Spleiss, see Beilauftiger Bericht von
dem jetzigen Cometsternen, etc., schaffhausen, 1664.

It can be easily understood that such authoritative utterances as that
of Dieterich must have produced a great effect throughout Protestant
Christendom; and in due time we see their working in New England. That
same tendency to provincialism, which, save at rare intervals, has been
the bane of Massachusetts thought from that day to this, appeared; and
in 1664 we find Samuel Danforth arguing from the Bible that "comets
are portentous signals of great and notable changes," and arguing from
history that they "have been many times heralds of wrath to a secure and
impenitent world." He cites especially the comet of 1652, which appeared
just before Mr. Cotton's sickness and disappeared after his death.
Morton also, in his Memorial recording the death of John Putnam, alludes
to the comet of 1662 as "a very signal testimony that God had then
removed a bright star and a shining light out of the heaven of his
Church here into celestial glory above." Again he speaks of another
comet, insisting that "it was no fiery meteor caused by exhalation, but
it was sent immediately by God to awaken the secure world," and goes
on to show how in that year "it pleased God to smite the fruits of the
ear