The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [119]
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 motu34 had confessed he had been at the Promontory of Noses, and had got one of the goodliest, &c. &c.—To this it was answered, it was impossible there should be such a place as the Promontory of Noses, and the learned be ignorant where it lay. The commissary35 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 authorities*,36 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,37 counsellor of the senate,—and the Popish, founded by Leopold, arch-duke of Austria,38 were, during all this time, employing the whole depth of their knowledge (except just what the affair of the abbess of Quedlingberg’s placket-holes required)—in determining the point of Martin Luther’s damnation.39
The Popish doctors had undertaken to demonstrate a priori;40 that from the 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 scorpio* (in reading this my father would always shake his head) in the ninth house which the Arabians allotted to religion—it appeared that Martin Luther did not care one stiver42 about the matter—and that from the horoscope directed to the conjunction of Mars—they made it plain likewise he must die cursing and blaspheming—with the blast of which his soul (being steep’d in guilt) sailed before the wind, into the lake of hell fire.
The little objection of the Lutheran doctors to this, was, that it must certainly be the soul of another man, born Oct. 22, 1482, which was forced to sail down before the wind in that manner—inasmuch as it appeared from the register of Islaben in the country of Mansfelt, that Luther was not born in the year 1483, but in 84; and not on the 22d day of October, but on the 10th of November, the eve of Martinmas-day, from whence he had the name of Martin.
[—I must break off my translation for a moment; for if I did not, I know I should no more be able to shut my eyes in bed, than the abbess of Quedlingberg—It is to tell the reader, that my father never read this passage of Slawkenbergius to my uncle Toby but with triumph—not over my uncle Toby, for he never opposed him in it—but over the whole world.
—Now you see, brother Toby, he would say, looking up, “that christian names are not such indifferent things;”—had Luther here been called by any other name but Martin, he would have been damned to all eternity—Not that I look upon Martin, he would add, as a good name—far from it—’tis something better than a neutral, and but a little—yet little as it is, you see it was of some service to him.
My father knew the weakness of this prop to his hypothesis, as well as the best logician could shew him—yet so strange is the weakness of man at the same time, as it fell in his way, he could not for his life but make use of it; and it was certainly