This little rhyme was originally put forth for German school children by two Protestant preachers of Basle, Switzerland, at the time of the great Comet of 1618, which heralded the outbreak of the great “Thirty Years’ War.”
These Protestant ministers got their belief in Comets and their evil influence upon mankind not from the Church of Rome, but from the Bible teachings of such great Protestant reformers as Martin Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, John Knox of Scotland, Bishop Jeremy Taylor and John Howe, the great Nonconformist divine.
Martin Luther preached in one of his Advent sermons:
“The heathen write that the Comet may arise from natural causes; but God creates not one that does not foretoken a sure calamity.”
Luther’s friend, Melanchthon, in a letter, declared Comets to be “heralds of Heaven’s wrath.”
Zwingli, in 1531, declared that the great Comet of that year (Halley’s Comet) was sent by God to betoken calamity.
John Knox, preaching in his Scottish kirk at Edinboro, declared that he saw in Comets tokens of the wrath of Heaven.
The great divines of the Church of England,—from Cranmer, Bishop Latimer, Archbishops Spottiswoode and Bramhall, Bishop Jeremy Taylor, down to our own times, clearly preached the doctrine that Comets must be taken as tokens from Heaven.
Thus the Comet of 1572 was pointed out from the pulpits of England and Scotland as a token of Heaven’s wrath and warning at the St. Bartholomew Massacre on the night of August 24, 1572, when thirty thousand Huguenots were murdered in the streets of Paris and elsewhere in France.
Across the sea, in the new Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the great New England divine and President of Harvard College, Increase Mather, on the apparition of the great Comet now known as Halley’s, in 1682, preached on “Heaven’s Wrath Alarm to the World—wherein is shown that fearful sights and signs in the Heavens are the presages of great calamities at hand.”