“Do you think,” said I, “that Shakespeare’s works would not exist without his image?”

“I believe,” said the man in black, “that Shakespeare’s image is looked at more than his works, and will be looked at, and perhaps adored, when they are forgotten.  I am surprised that they have not been forgotten long ago; I am no admirer of them.”

“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 yourself 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 Judea, and from Judea 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 was said that they persecuted terribly, but who said so?  The Christians.  The Christians could have given them a lesson in the art of persecution, and eventually did so.  None but Christians have ever been good persecutors; well, the old religion succumbed, Christianity prevailed, for the ferocious is sure to prevail over the gentle.”