“on to other topics” [NAVA]
We're often told to avoid talking about politics and religion in certain settings. Sherlock Holmes didn't spend much time on those topics either, aside from representing the government in a handful of cases, handling a case for the pope, having a rusty memory of the Old Testament, and one well-known reverie.
But there was one story in which Sherlock Holmes dealt with both politics and religion.
In "The Naval Treaty," Holmes was engaged by Percy Phelps, who had a position at the Foreign Office, thanks to his uncle, Lord Holdhurst. On Phelps's watch, a treaty between England and Italy that defined the Triple Alliance, went missing. While it was a matter of personal and professional interest to Phelps, there were political implications if the treaty were put on the open market.
In that very same story one of the most beautiful passages in the Canon has Sherlock Holmes contemplating a rose and the creator:
“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,” said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. “Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say gain that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
Is it any coincidence that we find religion being contemplated in the same story as politics?
Let's see how they handle it at Baker Street Elementary...
Baker Street Elementary follows the original adventures of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, as they and their friends work through the issues of elementary school in Victorian London. An archive of all previous episodes can be viewed at www.bakerstreetelementary.org.
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