the place owes its origin. Nature left to itself does not allow the healthy to be too oppressed with the idea, but education and the early environment of childhood create an atmosphere which no subsequent change can ever really eradicate. To some, with brain keen to the last, death comes as a sense that all is over. To others it is a going into the dark with all its vague terrors, much as the once similar terrors of early years. To some, bright visions reveal an enchanted land—and if by chance recovery takes place they remain the most real experience in life. We are not a particularly excitable or imaginative race, and the teaching of our faith is that after all we are only rejoining loved ones who have gone before; and yet a vague uneasiness can never be wholly put on one side. Recalling these feelings, we can well imagine the results when every condition unites to aggravate the horrors. For the cool Anglo-Saxon temperament substitute the wild imagination of the Eastern or Celtic races, or the black ignorance of savage tribes; and for a belief which only dwells on the joys of reunion substitute teaching in which everything terrible is embodied, and we get some insight into the power which has swayed mankind, and will, so long as mortality and its dread creature death is part of our nature.

And how to meet this dread end has given rise to every form of religious expression. Some have aggravated the fears, so that in their narcotics the faithful finding deliverance may prize the ministrations of the elect. Others have gone boldly and denied any future in its entirety. It is not death that is alarming, but the dying that is cause of fear. Some will have it that death is but absorption into the infinite, whilst others insist on the paradox that we are only resuming an existence of which this here is but trifling part.

And along with this dread is almost the complementary feeling, the passionate longing to once more have communion with the dear ones taken from us. And with some to have this desire is to be already more than half convinced of its possibility; and no

great evidence is required to satisfy them that their desires will be accomplished. The wish is father to the thought. And we always feel warmly to the bearer of good tidings, whilst most unreasonably we always have the opposite feeling to those who tell us ill news. The faithful friend who gives unpleasant advice is in the same category. Our gratitude is not proportionate to his disinterestedness. A mutual admiration society is generally a fool's paradise, but still it is a paradise, even if a fool's. It takes but little evidence to satisfy those already convinced. Thus in the end reason plays. little or no part in our views on these matters. Our feelings are the dominating factors of the situation. Belief and feeling are almost interchangeable terms. Hence the difference between science and theologythe difference there always is between the speculative, the imaginative, and the practical. All these are general principles common to human nature now and always; and it is these we have to consider when we would try and get into the mind, so to say, of an age that is past.

86. And here another fact we note, that around every belief, in some form or other, ritual or ceremonial has grown up which generally survives long after the original belief has passed away. Habits come first, their justification afterwards. The original justification wanting, a new one is easily found. When at last there comes too great divergence between current thought and ancient practices, especially when accompanied by undesirable conduct, a revulsion takes place, the whole is challenged, with the result that much good as well as much evil is rooted up in the consequent ruin. When any religion ossifies into form and ceases to be a living force in life this danger always confronts it. It will no more be saved by the plainness of its service than by the magnificence of its ritual. The same fate awaits them both. And life present, and its outward habiliments are not all `important. And this is particularly the case with Christ's teaching. Impressed on old beliefs, we must

not be surprised that many an outward observance of their past still persists as an integral part of the present organized religion. This is and always has been the history of change of thought, not in religion alone but in every department of life. For example: it is often asked how it is that so much of the Catholic ceremonial should find correspondence in the similar observances of the Buddhist religion. Probably it is a matter for as much surprise that such ceremonial should ever have been in conjunction with Buddha's teaching itself. The reason is the same in both cases. In both the teaching was superimposed on existing religions, with their established ceremonial, and which persisted, notwithstanding any change in thought. We know how the first Catholic missionaries in China came across the priests of Buddha and were confounded when they found them tonsured, using rosaries, praying in an unknown tongue, kneeling before images, as well as in their manner of chanting prayers and in their use of incense and candles; and more than all in their reverence of the image of a virgin "Queen of Heaven" who had an infant in her arms and held a cross. So Abbé Huc tells us that "the cross, the mitre, the dalmatics which the grand lamas wear on their journeys or when they are performing some ceremony out of the temple, the service with the double choirs, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer suspended from five chains, the benedictions given by the lamas by extending the right hand over the heads of the faithful, the chaplet, ecclesiastical celibacy, religious retirement, the worship of the saints, the fasts, the processions, the litanies, the holy waterall these are analogies between the Buddhists and ourselves." And to complete the resemblance, in Thibet is a Dalai Lama, a sort of Buddhistic Pope. And in essentials, most remarkable of all is the mutual veneration of relics—a veneration, certainly amongst the ignorant, almost amounting to worship. The origin of such belief is readily traceable to those feelings as to death into which we have just inquired. Our dead

having left their body still linger around it in spirit. No one, not the most callous or most logical, goes into the room of the newly dead feeling he is but in presence of inorganic matter. And we travel with the the dead when we take the body to its last home. Together they leave the house and only so leave it. We follow it to its grave, we visit its grave, for its once spirit still is there. Any belief to the contrary is a forced or an educated one; and unreasoning feeling far outweighs most reasoned of conclusions. And logic, never wanting in such matters, easily demonstrated that such spirit, lingering by its body, would equally be found by any portion of its body, or-this wantingby any article with which in life it was particularly associated. And we know how this idea swept the ancient world, and how much most of its mysteries was worship of some god or hero whose particular presence in some particular place had been thus secured. And the Buddhists, inheriting the idea, probably from a still older cult, equally made it an integral part of their religion. Wherever the spirit of Buddha, there was most holy place. And like all other spirits, he especially hovered round his earthly remains. These had long crumbled into dust; but amongst the treasures of their religion there would seem to have been actually preserved one of his teeth, a left collar bone, and a bone of the thorax. These have been most magnificently enshrined in nests of marvellous gold and silver boxes, and-kept in topes or towersare the centres of devotion of the devout Buddhist of every land.

That such ceremonial could bt part of the Buddhist religion-absolutely foreign to the spirit of his teaching -proves how forms will persist. What seems to happen is that new teaching is mostly addition, first. scouted, then heard, and at last adopted, with old thought only gradually shed. Probably no one would be more amazed than Buddha himself, if he were to return to life and find himself the centre of worship, and one of his teeth regarded as a treasure without

price. And in the recrudescence of so much of this ritual in the Christian Church we have evidence how widespread Christ's teaching must have been amongst the Buddhists of the past. We know they had their colony in Alexandria, so much the centre of the new faith; and it is not in any way a matter of surprise that they also were captivated by His thought. They might well see in Christ another incarnation, not of Buddha as a human being-a low and poor view of their ideas of incarnation-but of the true Buddha; of the divine spirit pervading Buddha, a spirit which found expression in his teaching, and to which teaching Christ gave a fuller and deeper meaning. Some have argued that the presence of so much Buddha-thought in the teaching of Christ, so much Buddhist ceremonial in the practices of the Church, were proof that Christianity was but an off-shoot of Buddhism, in which even Christ Himself was not altogether an essential. But this is not consonant with experience, nor in accord wih the way in which new religions have usually spread amongst mankind. That Christ should have been accepted by Buddhists, who at the same time retained so much of their old beliefs as was not inconsistent with His teaching, is in accord with experience, and what we might expect. But the reverse verges on the impossible. And Christ's teaching was not Buddha's teaching. Christ taught God our Father, whilst Buddha preached but a great negation. It was joyousness in life that Christ sought to bring mankind.

87. And exactly as we find survival of Buddhist and pre-Buhhdist thought and practices, so we shall find survival of other general faiths and practices of those days. The all-distinctive feature of Christ was His intense love of man. Love as the mainspring of life differentiated His teaching from all other teaching, and apart from this it is difficult to find any dogma, ceremonial, practice, or belief that is now part of the Christian religion, which is not to be found in some then coexisting or pre-existing faith. In fact we find a very