Bayle's Miscellaneous Reflections, Occasion'd by the Comet which appear'd in December 1680, first published in an English translation in 1708, is ostensibly an attack on popular superstitions, but the cumulative effect of the argument inevitably erodes the religion that the author claims to uphold. He must have known this. If a man can see the reasons that make the attribution of supernatural owers to the visible comet a superstition, then the attribution of such power to an invisible deity is all the more absurd.