According to Jewish tradition, darkness
overspread the earth for three days when the books of the Law were
profaned by translation into Greek. Tertullian thought an eclipse
an evidence of God's wrath against unbelievers. Nor has this mode
of thinking ceased in modern times. A similar claim was made at the
execution of Charles I; and Increase Mather thought an eclipse in
Massachusetts an evidence of the grief of Nature at the death of
President Chauncey, of Harvard College. Archbishop Sandys expected
eclipses to be the final tokens of woe at the destruction of the
world, and traces of this feeling have come down to our own time.
The quaint story of the Connecticut statesman who, when his
associates in the General Assembly were alarmed by an eclipse of
the sun, and thought it the beginning of the Day of Judgment,
quietly ordered in candles, that he might in any case be found
doing his duty, marks probably the last noteworthy appearance of
the old belief in any civilized nation.[173]
In these beliefs regarding meteors and eclipses there was little
calculated to do harm by arousing that superstitious terror which is
the worst breeding-bed of cruelty.
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