The child screams, and his mother comes running to the nursery; Susannah, meanwhile, makes her escape down the back stairs, telling the story in mid-flight to the cook. Walter learns of it from Obadiah. He takes a look and then retires to his library to consult the classical authorities on the value of circumcision. His conclusion is that if all the nations of antiquity, "if SOLON and PYTHAGORAS submitted — what is TRIS-TRAM? — Who am I, that I should fret or fume one moment about the matter?"
With good humor, Walter tells the advancing party, "This Tristram of ours, I find, comes very hardly by all his religious rites. — Never was the son of Jew, Christian, Turk, or Infidel initiated into them in so oblique and slovenly a manner." As Walter and Yorick bandy back and forth the opinions of the authorities, Toby is unable to figure out his nephew's condition. Apropos of Toby's question of what a "polemic divine" is, Yorick tells the story of Gymnast and Tripet; Toby and Trim do not understand.
Walter decides to read to the assembled a "short chapter or two" of his Tristra-paedia; Toby and Trim settle back to suffer since, as Walter says, "The first thirty pages . . . are a little dry." The manual for Tristram's education begins with an introduction to "political or civil government" designed to show "the foundation of the natural relation between a father and his child." Quite natural, says Yorick. When Walter quotes Justinian's "The son ought to pay her [his mother] respect," Yorick says that he can read that in the Catechism. Toby comments: "Trim can repeat every word of it by heart." Yorick asks Trim to quote the Fifth Commandment, but Toby points out that it must be asked properly. He raises his voice and gives the command: "The fifth — " "I must begin with the first, an' please your honour, said the corporal." When he finally gets to the fifth, Walter finds an inspired moral: " — SCIENCES MAY BE LEARNED BY ROTE, BUT WISDOM NOT." Walter is sure that Trim has no "idea annexed to any one word he has repeated," but when he asks Trim what he means by honoring his father and mother, Trim gives an answer that pleases Yorick mightily: "Allowing them, an' please your honour, three halfpence a day out of my pay, when they grew old." And since Trim really did so, Walter is bested once again.
