“He! he!” said the man in black; “occasionally.”
“For example,” said I, “upon this rock I will found my church.”
“He! he!” said the 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?”