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 pr