John Knox, preaching in his Scottish kirk at Edinboro, declared that he saw in Comets tokens of the wrath of Heaven. The great divines of the Church of England,—from Cranmer, Bishop Latimer, Archbishops Spottiswoode and Bramhall, Bishop Jeremy Taylor, down to our own times, clearly preached the doctrine that Comets must be taken as tokens from Heaven. Thus the Comet of 1572 was pointed out from the pulpits of England and Scotland as a token of Heaven’s wrath and warning at the St. Bartholomew Massacre on the night of August 24, 1572, when thirty thousand Huguenots were murdered in the streets of Paris and elsewhere in France. Across the sea, in the new Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the great New England divine and President of Harvard College, Increase Mather, on the apparition of the great Comet now known as Halley’s, in 1682, preached on “Heaven’s Wrath Alarm to the World—wherein is shown that fearful sights and signs in the Heavens are the presages of great calamities at hand.” Increase Mather preached on the text taken from the Book of Revelation: “And the third Angel sounded, and there fell a great Star burning as a Torch, ... and behold the Third Woe cometh quickly.” In this sermon the great preacher told of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who, when warned of the omen of a Comet, made fun of it, and then died miserably. So Mather preached: “For the Lord hath fired his beacon in the Heavens among the stars of God there. The fearful sign is not yet out of sight.... Do we not see the sword blazing over us?... Doth God threaten our very Heavens? O pray unto Him, that he would not take away stars and send Comets to succeed them!” [Illustration: THE TERROR OF THE COMET OF 1531. FROM AN OLD NUREMBERG WOOD-CUT.] The profound Russian thinker Tolstoy, in his great book “War and Peace,” has written of the flaming Comet of 1811. This was the famous “Comet of Napoleon,” which blazed over Western Europe when Napoleon was gathering his grand army for its disastrous march into Russia and to Moscow. At Moscow, the ancient capital of Russia, this Comet was observed by anxious thousands. One night there was this talk between a novice nun and the Abbess of her Convent. On their way to vesper service one evening in Moscow the nun suddenly beheld the Comet for the first time and asked: “What is that star?” The Abbess answered: “It is not a star. It is a Comet.” “But what is a Comet?” asked the young nun. “I have never heard that word.” The Abbess then answered: “Comets are signs in Heaven, which God sends before misfortunes.” Shortly after this the bloody battle of Borodino was fought, and Napoleon, with his army, appeared before the gates of Moscow. The hundred-towered city was abandoned by the Russians and was given over to the flames. Years afterward this same nun thus told her story, as printed in the “Revue des Deux Mondes”: