Such a monstrous nose, said they, had it been a true 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 shown it.
The only objection to this was, that if it proved anything, 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 the 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, showing them, that the Promontory of Noses was a mere allegorick 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, 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 Surmis , counsellor of the senate,⸺and the Popish , founded by Leopold , archduke of Austria , 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.
The Popish doctors had undertaken to demonstrate à priori, that from the necessary influence of the planets on the twenty-second day of