“You told me that you intended to be frank,” said I; “but, however frank you may be, I think you are rather wild.”

“We priests of Rome,” said the man in black, “even those amongst us who do not go much abroad, know a great deal about church matters, of which you heretics have very little idea.  Those of our brethren of the Propaganda, on their return home from distant missions, not unfrequently tell us very strange things relating to our dear mother; for example, our first missionaries to the East were not slow in discovering and telling to their brethren that our religion and the great Indian one were identical, no more difference between them than between Ram and Rome.  Priests, convents, beads, prayers, processions, fastings, penances, all the same, not forgetting anchorites and vermin, he! he!  The pope they found under the title of the grand lama, a sucking child surrounded by an immense number of priests.  Our good brethren, some two hundred years ago, had a hearty laugh, which their successors have often re-echoed; they said that helpless suckling and its priests put them so much in mind of their own old man, surrounded by his cardinals, he! he!  Old age is second childhood.”

“Did they find Christ?” said I.

“They found him too,” said the man in black, “that is, they saw his image; he is considered in India as a pure kind of being, and on that account, perhaps, is kept there rather in the background, even as he is here.”

“All this is very mysterious to me,” said I.

“Very likely,” said the man in black; “but of this I am tolerably sure, and so are most of those of Rome, that modern Rome had its religion from ancient Rome, which had its religion from the East.”

“But how?” I demanded.

“It was brought about, I believe, by the wanderings of nations,” said the man in black.  “A brother of the Propaganda, a very learned man, once told me—­I do not mean Mezzofante, who has not five ideas—­this brother once told me that all we of the Old World, from Calcutta to Dublin, are of the same stock, and were originally of the same language, and—­”

“All of one religion,” I put in.

“All of one religion,” said the mad in black; “and now follow different modifications of the same religion.”

“We Christians are not image-worshippers,” said I.

“You heretics are not, you mean,” said the man in black; “but you will be put down, just as you have always been, though others may rise up after you; the true religion is image-worship; people may strive against it, but they will only work themselves to an oil; how did it fare with that Greek Emperor, the Iconoclast, what was his name, Leon the Isaurian?  Did not his image-breaking cost him Italy, the fairest province of his empire, and did not ten fresh images start up at home for every one which he demolished?  Oh! you little know the craving which the soul sometimes feels after a good bodily image.”