Ginx's Baby: his birth and other misfortunes; a satire by Edward Jenkins
page 66 of 119 (55%)
page 66 of 119 (55%)
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the outset of his existence. Secular education! What do you
mean by it? Who shall sever one question from another, and call one secular and the other religious? Is not every relation and every truth in some way or other connected with religion?" &c. &c. Mr. Verity has been saying the same thing any time these forty years. "Forgive me," replied Mr. Ogle, "if I say that this is very vague talking. I have not proposed to sever one question from another. I only propose to do in a different way that which is being done now by the most rigid of Mr. Verity's friends. It is impossible to comprehend what is meant by such a statement as that every truth is somehow connected with religion. It may be that the notion--if it really is not, as I suspect it to be, mere verbiage and clap-trap, used by certain fools to mislead others--means that there is some such coherency between all truths as there is, for instance, between the elements of the body. I would admit that, but is not blood a different and perfectly severable thing from bone? Each has its place, office, relation. But who would say that one could not be regarded by a physicist in the largest variety of its aspects apart from the other? Yet the physicist comes back again to consider with respect to each its relations to all the rest! The separate study has rather prepared him for more profound insight into those relations. Thus it is with the body of truth. In spite of Mr. Verity I affirm that there are truths that have not in themselves any element of religion whatever. The forty-seventh proposition of Euclid will be taught by a Jesuit precisely as it is taught in the London University; geography will affirm certain principles and designate places, rivers, mountains--that no faith |
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