"The Priests of Baal kissed their idols so.

"Tully tells us of a fair image of Hercules at Agrigentum, whose chin
was worn by kissing. The lower parts of the statue we call Peter are
Jupiter. The toe is sore worn, but not all by Christian mouths. The
heathen vulgar laid their lips there first, for many a year, and ours
have but followed them, as monkeys their masters. And that is why, down
with the poor heathen!

Pereant qui ante nos nostra fecerint.

"Our infant baptism is Persian, with the font and the signing of the
child's brow. Our throwing three handfuls of earth on the coffin, and
saying dust to dust, is Egyptian.

"Our incense is Oriental, Roman, Pagan; and the early Fathers of the
Church regarded it with superstitious horror, and died for refusing to
handle it. Our Holy water is Pagan, and all its uses. See, here is a
Pagan aspersorium. Could you tell it from one of ours? It stood in the
same part of their temples, and was used in ordinary worship as ours,
and in extraordinary purifications. They called it Aqua lustralis. Their
vulgar, like ours, thought drops of it falling on the body would wash
out sin; and their men of sense, like ours, smiled or sighed at such
credulity. What saith Ovid of this folly, which hath outlived him?

'Ah nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina coedis
Fluminea tolli posse putetis aqua.'

Thou seest the heathen were not all fools. No more are we. Not all."

Fra Colonna uttered all this with such volubility, that his hearers
could not edge in a word of remonstrance; and not being interrupted
in praising his favourites, he recovered his good humour, without any
diminution of his volubility.

"We celebrate the miraculous Conception of the Virgin on the 2nd of
February. The old Romans celebrated the Miraculous Conception of Juno on
the 2nd of February. Our feast of All Saints is on the 2nd November. The
Festum Dei Mortis was on the 2nd November. Our Candlemas is also an old
Roman feast; neither the date nor the ceremony altered one tittle.
The patrician ladies carried candles about the city that night as our
signoras do now. At the gate of San Croce our courtesans keep a feast
on the 20th August. Ask them why! The little noodles cannot tell you. On
that very spot stood the Temple of Venus. Her building is gone; but her
rite remains. Did we discover Purgatory? On the contrary, all we really
know about it is from two treatises of Plato, the Gorgias and the
Phaedo, and t