"May it please your highness," said the Jew, calmly, "I am here at your own command, and I answer your questions according to the best of my poor ability. If the allegory I relate be objectionable, it is for the sultan to find fault with it alone, and not with the reflections which it must necessarily suggest." "And dost thou mean, then, that thy paltry tale shall serve as a full answer to my query?" demanded Sal-ad-Deen. "No, your highness," said Nathaniel, "but I would have it serve as my apology for not giving such an answer. The father of these youths caused the three rings to be made expressly that no examination might be able to detect any dissimilarity between them; and I will venture to assert, that not even the Sublimest of Mankind, the Sultan Sal-ad-Deen himself, could, unless by accident, have placed his hand on the true one." "Thou triflest with me, Nathaniel," said the sultan; "a ring is not a religion. There are, it is true, many modes of worship on the earth: but has not Islamism always remained a distinct system of faith from the false creeds? Look at its dogmas, its ceremonies, the modes of prayer, the habits, yea, the very food and raiment of its professors! What sayest thou of these?" "Simply," returned the Jew, "that none of them are proofs of the truth of Islamism. Nay, be not wroth with me, your highness, for what I say of your religion I say equally of all others. There is one true religion, as there was one true ring in my parable; but you must have perceived that all men are not alike capable of discovering the truth by their own unassisted efforts, and that a certain degree of trust in the good faith of others as teachers is therefore essential to the reception of religious belief at all. In whom, then, I would ask, is it most natural for us to place our trust? Surely in our own people--in those of whose blood we are--who have been about us from our childhood, and given us unnumbered proofs of love--and who have never been guilty of intentionally practising deception upon us. How can I ask of you to abandon the prepossessions of your fathers before you, and in which, true or false, you have been nurtured? Or how can you expect, that, in order to yield to your teachers the praise belonging solely to the truth, I should virtually declare my ancestors fools or hypocrites?" "Sophistical declamation!" said the sultan, "which will avail thee little on the Judgment Day. Is thy parable ended?"