Shall, then, such mighty works of God as comets are be insignificant things ?"( 113) (113) Increase Mather's Heaven's Alarm to the World was first printed at Boston in 1681, but was reprinted in 1682, and was appended, with the sermon on The Latter Sign, to the Discourse on Comets (Boston, 1683).
III.

THE INVASION OF SCEPTICISM.
Vigorous as Mather's argument is, we see scepticism regarding "signs" continuing to invade the public mind; and, in spite of his threatenings, about twenty years after we find a remarkable evidence of this progress in the fact that this scepticism has seized upon no less a personage than that colossus of orthodoxy, his thrice illustrious son, Cotton Mather himself; and him we find, in 1726, despite the arguments of his father, declaring in his Manuductio: "Perhaps there may be some need for me to caution you against being dismayed at the signs of the heavens, or having any superstitious fancies upon eclipses and the like....

I am willing that you be apprehensive of nothing portentous in blazing stars.
For my part, I know not whether all our worlds, and even the sun itself, may not fare the better for them."(114) (114) For Cotton Mather, see the Manuductio, pp.

54, 55.
Curiously enough, for this scientific scepticism in Cotton Mather there was a cause identical with that which had developed superstition in the mind of his father.

The same provincial tendency to receive implicitly any new European fashion in thinking or speech wrought upon both, plunging one into superstition and drawing the other out of it.
European thought, which New England followed, had at last broken away in great measure from the theological view of comets as signs and wonders.
The germ of this emancipating influence was mainly in the great utterance of Seneca; and we find in nearly every century some evidence that this germ was still alive.