No sect had been free from this superstition. Popes and priests had taught their followers to pray against the evil influences of comets and other celestial portents; Luther and Melanchthon had condemned in no measured terms the rashness and impiety of those who had striven to show that the heavenly bodies and the earth move in concordance with law--those 'fools who wish to reverse the entire science of astronomy.' A long interval had elapsed between the time when the Copernican theory was struggling for existence--when, but that more serious heresies engaged men's attention and kept religious folk by the ears, that astronomical heresy would probably have been quenched in blood--and the forging by Newton of the final link of the chain of reasoning on which modern astronomy is based; but in those times the minds of men moved more slowly than in ours. The masses still held to the old beliefs about the heavenly bodies. Defoe, indeed, speaking of the terror of men at the time of the Great Plague, says that they 'were more addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives' tales, than ever they were before or since.' But in reality, it was only because of the great misery then prevailing that men seemed more superstitious than usual; for misery brings out the superstitions--the fetishisms, if we may so speak--which are inherent in many minds, but concealed from others in prosperous times, out of shame, or perhaps a worthier feeling. Even in our own times great national calamities would show that many superstitions exist which had been thought extinct, and we should see excited among the ill-educated that particular form of persecution which arises, not from zeal for religion and not from intolerance, but from the belief that the troubles have been sent because of unbelief and the fear that unless some expiation be made the evil will not pass away from the midst of the people. It is at such times of general affliction that minds of the meaner sort have proved 'zealous even to slaying.'