“Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from Heaven.” In the Revelation of St. John the Divine (Chap. VIII., Verse 10) we read: “There fell from Heaven a great star burning as a torch,” and again (Chap. XII., Verse 3): “There was seen another sign in Heaven, and behold a great red dragon ... and his tail draweth a third part of the stars in Heaven. And behold the third woe cometh quickly.” (Chap. XII., Verse 14.) The “flaming sword” in the hands of the angel of the Lord, when Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden, many sacred writers hold, can only be interpreted as a Comet. “For the Almighty set before the door Of th’ holy park a seraphim that bore A warning sword, whose body shined bright A flaming Comet in the midst of night.” —_Todd._ So, too, when Jerusalem was to be wasted by a plague, David beheld a Comet in the shape of a flaming sword: “And David lifted up his eyes and saw the angel of the Lord stand between the earth and the Heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem.” —_I. Chron. XXI. 16._ The fall of Satan, some sacred writers hold, was marked by the appearance of a Comet. In Isaiah (XIV. 12) we find: “How art thou fallen from Heaven, O flaming one, son of the morning!” John Milton, in his “Paradise Lost,” has fixed this image in immortal verse: “Satan stood Unterrified, and as a Comet burned That fired the length of Ophiuchus huge In th’ arctic sky, and from its horrid hair, Shakes pestilence and war.” The Great Deluge, described in Holy Writ, came after the appearance of a mighty Comet (Halley’s Comet), so Dr. William Whiston, Sir Isaac Newton’s successor in the Lucasian chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, set forth in a special treatise. The great French astronomer, Laplace, also reached the same conclusion. This same Comet (Halley’s Comet) likewise foretold the final fall of the Holy City, Jerusalem, in the year 70 after Christ. This Comet was seen by St. Peter. Josephus in his History of the Jewish Wars recorded the nightly appearance of this Comet over the City of Jerusalem just before the war which ended with the destruction of the Holy City. “Amongst other warnings,” writes Josephus, who saw this Comet with his own eyes, “a Comet of the kind called sword-shaped, because their tails appear to represent the blade of a sword, was seen above the city for the space of a whole year.” 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.