"

"But I can't imagine," said I, "how you will put aside the authority of
Moses. If Moses strove against image-worship, should not his doing so be
conclusive as to the impropriety of the practice; what higher authority
can you have than that of Moses?"

"The practice of the great majority of the human race," said the man in
black, "and the recurrence to image-worship, where image-worship has been
abolished. Do you know that Moses is considered by the church as no
better than a heretic, and though, for particular reasons, it has been
obliged to adopt his writings, the adoption was merely a sham one, as it
never paid the slightest attention to them? No, no, the church was never
led by Moses, nor by one mightier than he, whose doctrine it has equally
nullified--I allude to Krishna in his second avatar; the church, it is
true, governs in his name, but not unfrequently gives him the lie, if he
happens to have said anything which it dislikes. Did you never hear the
reply which Padre Paolo Segani made to the French Protestant Jean
Anthoine Guerin, who had asked him whether it was easier for Christ to
have been mistaken in his Gospel, than for the Pope to be mistaken in his
decrees?"

"I never heard their names before," said I.

"The answer was pat," said the man in black, "though he who made it was
confessedly the most ignorant fellow of the very ignorant order to which
he belonged, the Augustine. 'Christ might err as a man,' said he, 'but
the Pope can never err, being God.' The whole story is related in the
Nipotismo."

"I wonder you should ever have troubled yourselves with Christ at all,"
said I.

"What was to be done?" said the man in black; "the power of that name
suddenly came over Europe, like the power of a mighty wind; it was said
to have come from Judaea, and from Judaea it probably came when it first
began to agitate minds in these parts; but it seems to have been known in
the remote East, more or less, for thousands of years previously. It
filled people's minds with madness; it was followed by books which were
never much regarded, as they contained little of insanity; but the name!
what fury that breathed into people! the books were about peace and
gentleness, but the name was the most horrible of war-cries--those who
wished to uphold old names at first strove to oppose it, but their
efforts were feeble, and they had no good war-cry; what was Mars as a war-
cry compared with the name of . . .? It wa