“I must ask Father Nicholas to show thee how it is,” she said at last in a kindly manner. “I am only an ignorant girl. But he can explain to thee.”
“Can he?” said Belasez. “What explanations of his, or any one’s, can prove that man may please himself about obeying his Maker? He will tell me—does my damsel think I have never listened to a Christian priest?—he will tell me to offer incense to yonder gilded image. Had I not better offer it to myself? I am a living daughter of Israel: is that not better than the stone image of a dead one?”
“Better than our blessed Lady!” cried the horrified Margaret.
“Perhaps, if she were here, a living woman, she might be the better woman of the two,” said Belasez, coolly. “But a living woman, I am sure, is better than a stone image, which can neither see, nor hear, nor feel.”
“Oh, but don’t you know,” said Margaret eagerly, as a bright idea occurred to her, “that we have the holy Father,—the Pope? He keeps the Church right; and our Lord commissioned Saint Peter, who was the first Pope, to teach every body and promised to guard him from all error.”
Margaret was mentally congratulating herself on this brilliant solution of all difficulties. Belasez looked up thoughtfully. “But did He promise to guard all the successors?”
“Oh, of course!”
“I wonder—supposing He were the Messiah—if He did,” said Belasez. “Because I have sometimes thought that might explain it.”
“What might explain it?”
“My damsel knows that the disciples of great teachers often corrupt their master’s teaching, and in course of time they may come to teach doctrines quite different from his. It has struck me sometimes whether it might be so with you: that your Master was truly the Sent of God, and that you have so corrupted His doctrines that there is very little likeness left now. There must be very little, if He spoke according to the will of the Holy One.”