As to their purpose, having quoted largely from the Bible and
from Luther, he winds up by insisting that, as God can make nothing
in vain, comets must have some distinct object; then, from Isaiah
and Joel among the prophets, from Matthew, Mark, and Luke among the
evangelists, from Origen and John Chrysostom among the fathers,
from Luther and Melanchthon among the Reformers, he draws various
texts more or less conclusive to prove that comets indicate evil
and only evil; and he cites Luther's Advent sermon to the effect
that, though comets may arise in the course of Nature, they are
still signs of evil to mankind. In answer to the theory of sundry
naturalists that comets are made up of "a certain fiery, warm,
sulphurous, saltpetery, sticky fog," he declaims: "Our sins, our
sins: they are the fiery heated vapours, the thick, sticky,
sulphurous clouds which rise from the earth toward heaven before
God." Throughout the sermon Dieterich pours contempt over all men
who simply investigate comets as natural objects, calls special
attention to a comet then in the heavens resembling a long broom or
bundle of rods, and declares that he and his hearers can only
consider it rightly "when we see standing before us our Lord God
in heaven as an angry father with a rod for his children.
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