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, &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 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 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,[4.4] 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_, 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 _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 _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[4.5] (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 stiver 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, in 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, 83, which was forced to sail down before the wind in that manner--inasmuch as it appeared from the register of _Islaben_ in the county 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_.