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.