that turned
principally to account. In compliance, however, with the impressions of
fear which the strangeness and excessive length of these stars made upon
mankind, the Astrologers did not hesitate to pronounce them of a malign
tendency; and the more so when they found they had, by this means, made
themselves in some degree necessary, in consequence of the impatient
applications that were made to them as from the mouth of an oracle, what
particular disaster such and such a comet portended.

Eclipses furnished more frequent occasions for the exercise of their
talent. From this worthy precedent of Judicial Astrology, others took
the hint and invented new modes of divination, such as Geomancy,
Chiromancy, Onomancy, and the like; till the world by degrees became so
overrun with superstition, that the least trifle was converted into a
presage or presentiment; and the more so when this kind of knowledge
became the business of religion; and when the substance of divine
worship consisted in the ordinances of Augurs who, to make themselves
necessary in the world, were obliged to keep up and quicken men's
apprehensions of the wrath of God, took special care to cultivate
comets, and bring it into a proverb, that "so many comets so many
calamities." They knew, as Livy expresses it, that it was best to fish
in troubled waters, where, speaking of a contagious distemper, which,
from the country villages, spread over the city, occasioned by an
extraordinary drought in the year of Rome 326, he observes how, at last,
it infected the mind,[124] by the management of those who lived in the
superstition of the people; so that nothing was to be seen or heard
except some new fangled ceremony or other in every corner. "The devil,"
as Bayle says, "who had a hopeful game on't, and saw superstition the
surest way to get himself worshipped under the name of the false gods,
in a hundred various ways, all criminal and abominable in the sight of
the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, never failed, on the appearance
of any rare meteor, or uncommon star, to exert his imposing arts, and
make idolaters believe, they were the signs of divine wrath, and that
they were all undone unless they appeased their gods by sacrifices of
men and brute beasts."

Politicians have also lent a helping hand to give presages a reputation,
as an excellent scheme, either to intimidate the people, or to raise
their drooping spirits. Had the Roman soldiers been free thinker