als more directly to the highest poetic
feeling than that given by one of the evangelists, in which a star,
rising in the east, conducted the wise men to the manger where the
Galilean peasant-child--the Hope of Mankind, the Light of the World--was
lying in poverty and helplessness.

Among the Mohammedans we have a curious example of the same tendency
toward a kindly interpretation of stars and meteors, in the belief of
certain Mohammedan teachers that meteoric showers are caused by good
angels hurling missiles to drive evil angels out of the sky.

Eclipses were regarded in a very different light, being supposed
to express the distress of Nature at earthly calamities. The Greeks
believed that darkness overshadowed the earth at the deaths of
Prometheus, Atreus, Hercules, Aesculapius, and Alexander the Great. The
Roman legends held that at the death of Romulus there was darkness for
six hours. In the history of the Caesars occur portents of all three
kinds; for at the death of Julius the earth was shrouded in darkness,
the birth of Augustus was heralded by a star, and the downfall of Nero
by a comet. So, too, in one of the Christian legends clustering about
the crucifixion, darkness overspread the earth from the sixth to the
ninth hour. Neither the silence regarding it of the only evangelist who
claims to have been present, nor the fact that observers like Seneca
and Pliny, who, though they carefully described much less striking
occurrences of the same sort and in more remote regions, failed to
note any such darkness even in Judea, have availed to shake faith in an
account so true to the highest poetic instincts of humanity.

This view of the relations between Nature and man continued among both
Jews and Christians. 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 G