From a
multitude of examples a few may be selected as typical. Early in
the sixteenth century Polydore Virgil, an ecclesiastic of the
unreformed Church, alludes, in his _English History_, to the presage
of the death of the Emperor Constantine by a comet as to a simple
matter of fact; and in his work on prodigies he pushes this
superstition to its most extreme point, exhibiting comets as
preceding almost every form of calamity.
In 1532, just at the transition period from the old Church to the
new, Cranmer, paving the way to his archbishopric, writes from
Germany to Henry VIII, and says of the comet then visible: "What
strange things these tokens do signify to come hereafter, God
knoweth; for they do not lightly appear but against some great matter."
Twenty years later Bishop Latimer, in an Advent sermon, speaks of
eclipses, rings about the sun, and the like, as signs of the
approaching end of the world.[179]
In 1580, under Queen Elizabeth, there was set forth an "order of
prayer to avert God's wrath from us, threatened by the late
terrible earthquake, to be used in all parish churches.
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