“Spoken like a true heretic,” said the man in black; “one of the faithful would have placed his image before his words; for what are all the words in the world compared with a good bodily image?”

“I believe you occasionally quote his words?” said I.

“He! he!” said the man in black; “occasionally.”

“For example,” said I, “upon this rock I will found my church.”

“He! he!” said the man in black; “you must really become one of us.”

“Yet you must have had some difficulty in getting the rock to Rome?”

“None whatever,” said the man in black; “faith can remove mountains, to say nothing of rocks—­ho! ho!”

“But I cannot imagine,” said I, “what advantage you could derive from perverting those words of Scripture in which the Saviour talks about eating his body.”

“I do not know, indeed, why we troubled our heads about the matter at all,” said the man in black; “but when you talk about perverting the meaning of the text, you speak ignorantly, Mr. Tinker; when he whom you call the Saviour gave his followers the sop, and bade them eat it, telling them it was his body, he delicately alluded to what it was incumbent upon them to do after his death, namely, to eat his body.”

“You do not mean to say that he intended they should actually eat his body?”

“Then you suppose ignorantly,” said the man in black; “eating the bodies of the dead was a heathenish custom, practised by the heirs and legatees of people who left property; and this custom is alluded to in the text.”

“But what has the New Testament to do with heathen customs,” said I, “except to destroy them?”

“More than you suppose,” said the man in black.  “We priests of Rome, who have long lived at Rome, know much better what the New Testament is made of than the heretics and their theologians, not forgetting their Tinkers; though I confess some of the latter have occasionally surprised us—­for example, Bunyan.  The New Testament is crowded with allusions to heathen customs, and with words connected with pagan sorcery.  Now, with respect to words, I would fain have you, who pretend to be a philologist, tell me the meaning of Amen?”

I made no answer.

“We, of Rome,” said the man in black, “know two or three things of which the heretics are quite ignorant; for example, there are those amongst us—­those, too, who do not pretend to be philologists—­who know what amen is, and, moreover, how we got it.  We got it from our ancestors, the priests of ancient Rome; and they got the word from their ancestors of the East, the priests of Buddh and Brahma.”

“And what is the meaning of the word?” I demanded.

“Amen,” said the man in black, “is a modification of the old Hindoo formula, Omani batsikhom, by the almost ceaseless repetition of which the Indians hope to be received finally to the rest or state of forgetfulness of Buddh or Brahma; a foolish practice you will say, but are you heretics much wiser, who are continually sticking amen to the end of your prayers, little knowing when you do so, that you are consigning yourselves to the repose of Buddh?  Oh, what hearty laughs our missionaries have had when comparing the eternally sounding Eastern gibberish of Omani batsikhom, and the Ave Maria and Amen Jesus of our own idiotical devotees.”