“According to one account I have since lost touch of, people were fond of seeing ‘comets’ as angels on errand. Halley’s shocking prediction thus became a line drawn in the sand, because if he was right, then what use did people have of a creator ‘God’? Could God himself and the vanishingly little space science had allocated to him (now in the heavens) be totally snuffed out? How do we meet the sacred if it is nowhere to be found – totally exiled by the regular?”