The barber's chair; and, The hedgehog lettersJerrold, Douglas William
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The barber's chair; and, The hedgehog letters
Jerrold, Douglas William
English literature -- 19th century; English wit and humor
And now, grandmother, comes the Roman Catholic Bishops. They won’t
have Peel’s plan of education unless all the masters are to be of
their own faith. For they say “the Roman Catholic pupils could not
attend the lectures on history, logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy,
geology, or anatomy, without exposing their faith or morals to imminent
danger--_unless a Roman Catholic professor_ shall be appointed for each
of those chairs.” You see, the lecturer on history, if a Protestant,
might be making Queen Mary--Bloody Mary, as I was taught to call her
at day-school--a very cruel wretch, indeed; whereas the Queen Mary of
the Catholic might be a very nice woman, who never could abide fagots,
and never knew where Smithfield was. And then for logic (you must, as
I’ve said before, look dictionary for hard words); logic, it seems, is
a matter of religion. What’s logic to a Protestant isn’t to a Catholic,
or a Mahometan, or a Chinese! In the same way, I suppose, that a
straight line in London would be what they call a curve in Dublin, and
perhaps a whole circle at Canton. And then for “geology” and “anatomy,”
why, we all know that there’s nothing certain in anatomy; that it’s
all a matter of faith. Thus, if a Catholic anatomist lectured, we’ll
say, upon the body of a Protestant pluralist, he might, out of
blindness, declare that the said body never had a single atom of heart;
that such pluralists always lived without the article. While on the
other side, the real Protestant lecturer, discussing on the self-same
_corcup_, might declare that it was all heart, like a summer cabbage!
“Professors’ chairs!” when I read these things, I somehow do think of
the baby-chair that I used to be set up in to take my meals, with a
stick run through the arms to keep me from tumbling out, the talk is so
childish!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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