A COMET flashed across the wintry European sky, and people trembled. At the end of that year of 1680, pious folk thought it Gods warning of impending disaster.

But in Rotterdam there lived a Frenchman who was thought not very pious: Pierre Bayle. He was not shaken. He wrote his Penses diverses sur la comte. Comets, he said, cross the sky according to fixed laws. Godacts complying with certain laws He established according to His free will.

Perhaps