 nose, could not
possibly have been suffered in civil society - and if false - to impose upon
society with such false signs and tokens, was a still greater violation of its
rights, and must have had still less mercy shewn it.
    The only objection to this was, that if it proved any thing, it proved the
stranger's nose was neither true nor false.
    This left room for the controversy to go on. It was maintained by the
advocates of the ecclesiastic court, that there was nothing to inhibit a decree,
since the stranger ex mero motu had confessed he had been at the Promontory of
Noses, and had got one of the goodliest, etc. etc. - To this it was answered, it
was impossible there should be such a place as the Promontory of Noses, and
learned be ignorant where it lay. The commissary of the bishop of Strasburg
undertook the advocates, explained this matter in a treatise upon proverbial
phrases, shewing them, that the Promontory of Noses was a mere allegoric
expression, importing no more than that nature had given him a long nose: in
proof of which, with great learning, he cited the underwritten authorities11,
which had decided the point incontestably, had it not appeared that a dispute
about some franchises of dean and chapter-lands had been determined by it
nineteen years before.
    It happened - I must not say unluckily for Truth, because they were giving
her a lift another way in so doing; that the two universities of Strasburg - the
Lutheran, founded in the year 1538 by Jacobus Sturmius, counsellor of the
senate, - and the Popish, founded by Leopold, arch-duke of Austria, were, during
all this time, employing the whole depth of their knowledge (except just what
the affair of the abbess of Quedlinberg's placket-holes required) - in
determining the point of Martin Luther's damnation.
    The Popish doctors had undertaken to demonstrate a priori; that from
necessary influence of the planets on the twenty-second day of October 1483 --
when the moon was in the twelfth house - Jupiter, Mars, and Venus in the third,
the Sun, Saturn, and Mercury all got together in the fourth - that he must in
course, and unavoidably, be a damn'd man - and that his doctrines, by a direct
corollary, must be damn'd doctrines too.
    By inspection into his horoscope, where five planets were in coition all at
once with scorpio12 (in reading this my father would always shake his head) in
the ninth house which the Arabians allotted to religion - it
