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But he spoke of the lucubrations themselves as valuable only where suggestive of some truths which Forman had accidentally approached, without being aware of their true nature and importance. They were debased by absurd puerilities, and vitiated by the vain and presumptuous ignorance which characterized the astrology of the middle ages.
But the rabbis daub it over with their pious puerilities. They solemnly inform us that Esau was a trickster, as though Jacob's qualities were catching? and that he tried to bite his brother's neck, but God turned it into marble, and he only broke his teeth. Esau wept for the pain in his grinders. But why did Jacob weep? This looks like a poser, yet later rabbis surmounted the difficulty.
Put away such unwomanly scoffing, such irreverent puerilities; sweep your soul clean of all such wretched rubbish, and when you feel tempted to repine at your lot, recollect the noble admonition of Dschelaleddin, 'If this world were our abiding-place, we might complain that it makes our bed so hard; but it is only our night-quarters on a journey, and who can expect home comforts?"
But they found nobody to believe them; the Perkinean Institution fell into neglect; and Perkins made his exit from England, carrying with him about ten thousand pounds, to soothe his declining years in the good city of Pennsylvania. Thus was magnetism laughed out of England for a time. In France, the revolution left men no leisure for such puerilities.
Government became despotism, which even assassination could not temper; patriotism became servility; vices the most foul flouted themselves in public; literature sank to puerilities; learning was forgotten; fertile districts became waste without the ravages of war everywhere inequality produced decay, political, mental, moral, and material.
He who shall more honor truth than the vain subtilities of theology, will quickly perceive that this pompous science is nothing more than an unintelligible jumble of false hypothesis; that it continually begs its principles; is full of sophisms; contains only vitiated circles; embraces the most subdolous distinctions; is ushered to mankind by the most disingenuous arguments, from which it is not possible, under any given circumstances, there should result any thing but puerilities the most endless disputes.
They applied to Protestant teachers and Protestant books, and received too often the answer that the Gospel had nothing to do with art art was either Pagan or Popish; and as for the centuries before the Reformation, they and all in them belonged utterly to darkness and the pit. As for the heroes of early Christianity, they were madmen or humbugs; their legends, devilish and filthy puerilities.
It is the all-pervading presence of this greatest fact in Christendom which has carried on Rome's importance from the days of the Cæsars, across the chasm of the dark ages, to the days of the modern popes; and its really enormous importance continually throws forward into cruel relief the puerilities and inanities of the daily outward world.
The scholastic philosophy which some ridicule, in spite of its puerilities and sophistries and syllogisms, preserved the theology of the Middle Ages, perhaps of the Fathers. It was a mighty bulwark of the faith which was then, accepted. No honors could be conferred on its great architects that were deemed extravagant.
The Marshal answered me by word of mouth and by letter; he refused me by both. I remember he added this circumstance: that he found the Regent in bed, and acquainted him with what the Chevalier desired; that the Regent rose up in a passion, said that the things which were asked were puerilities, and swore that he would not see him.
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