Two or three examples out of many may serve as types.

First of these may be named the teaching of Jacob Heerbrand, professor at the University of Tubingen, who in 1577 illustrated the moral value of comets by comparing the Almighty sending a comet, to the judge laying the executioner's sword on the table between himself and the criminal in a court of justice; and, again, to the father or schoolmaster displaying the rod before naughty children.
A little later we have another churchman of great importance in that region, Schickhart, head pastor and superintendent at Goppingen, preaching and publishing a comet sermon, in which he denounces those who stare at such warnings of God without heeding them, and compares them to "calves gaping at a new barn door." Still later, at the end of the seventeenth century, we find Conrad Dieterich, director of studies at the University of Marburg, denouncing all scientific investigation of comets as impious, and insisting that they are only to be regarded as "signs and wonders."(103) (103) For the effect of the anti-Pythagorean oath, see Prowe, Copernicus; also Madler and Wolf.

For Heerbrand, see his Von dem erschrockenlichen Wunderzeichen, Tubingen, 1577.

For Schickart, see his Predigt vom Wunderzeichen, Stuttgart, 1621.

For Deiterich, see his sermon, described more fully below.
The results of this ecclesiastical pressure upon science in the universities were painfully shown during generation after generation, as regards both professors and students; and examples may be given typical of its effects upon each of these two classes.
The first of these is the case of Michael Maestlin.