The greatest scientists of the age, Isaac Newton chief among them, believed as fervently as everyone else that they lived in the shadow of the apocalypse. Every era lives with contradictions that it manages to ignore. The Greeks talked of justice and kept slaves. The Crusaders preached the gospel of the Prince of Peace and rode off to annihilate the infidels. The seventeenth century believed in a universe that ran like clockwork, entirely in accord with natural law, and also in a God who reached down into the world to perform miracles and punish sinners.
