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.