“The life of a people is but a succession of miseries, crimes, and follies.  This is true of the Penguin nation, as of all other nations.  Save for this exception its history is admirable from beginning to end.”

The two classic ages of the Penguins are too well-known for me to lay stress upon them.  But what has not been sufficiently noticed is the way in which the rationalist theologians such as Canon Princeteau called into existence the unbelievers of the succeeding age.  The former employed their reason to destroy what did not seem to them, essential to their religion; they only left untouched the most rigid article of faith.  Their intellectual successors, being taught by them how to make use of science and reason, employed them against whatever beliefs remained.  Thus rational theology engendered natural philosophy.

That is why (if I may turn from the Penguins of former days to the Sovereign Pontiff, who, to-day governs the universal Church) we cannot admire too greatly the wisdom of Pope Pius X. in condemning the study of exegesis as contrary to revealed truth, fatal to sound theological doctrine, and deadly to the faith.  Those clerics who maintain the rights of science in opposition to him are pernicious doctors and pestilent teachers, and the faithful who approve of them are lacking in either mental or moral ballast.

At the end of the age of philosophers, the ancient kingdom of Penguinia was utterly destroyed, the king put to death, the privileges of the nobles abolished, and a Republic proclaimed in the midst of public misfortunes and while a terrible war was raging.  The assembly which then governed Penguinia ordered all the metal articles contained in the churches to be melted down.  The patriots even desecrated the tombs of the kings.  It is said that when the tomb of Draco the Great was opened, that king presented an appearance as black as ebony and so majestic that those who profaned his corpse fled in terror.  According to other accounts, these churlish men insulted him by putting a pipe in his mouth and derisively offering him a glass of wine.

On the seventeenth day of the month of Mayflowers, the shrine of St. Orberosia, which had for five hundred years been exposed to the veneration of the faithful in the Church of St. Mael, was transported into the town-hall and submitted to the examination of a jury of experts appointed by the municipality.  It was made of gilded copper in shape like the nave of a church, entirely covered with enamels and decorated with precious stones, which latter were perceived to be false.  The chapter in its foresight had removed the rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and great balls of rock-crystal, and had substituted pieces of glass in their place.  It contained only a little dust and a piece of old linen, which were thrown into a great fire that had been lighted on the Place de Greve to burn the relics of the saints.  The people danced around it singing patriotic songs.