hibiting what, no doubt, is the dark side of practical Buddhism (for the light side we cannot expect to be very patent to English residents and foreign missionaries), but which still, I fear, must be accepted as a true picture, so far as it goes:

"It is specifically urged against the doctrines of Fo, by the Confucians, that they unfit men for the business and duties of life, by fixing their speculations so entirely on another state of existence as to lead some fanatics to hang or drown themselves in order to anticipate futurity; nay, two persons have been known to commit suicide together with the view of becoming man and wife in the next world. The priests are sometimes accused of employing their superstitious arts in seducing women; societies of women, at least, called Ny-Koo, a species of nun or female devotees, are encouraged by them. The tricks occasionally made use of by the priests resemble the practices of the fakirs of India. Le Comte tells a story of a bonze, who went about in a vessel stuck full of nails (something like that in which the Carthaginians are said to have shut up Regulus), and pretending that it was a merit to relieve him from his pain, he sold these nails to the devout at so much per head.

"Their notion of abstraction, or quietism, seems to aim at getting rid of all passions, even of thought itself, and ceasing to be urged by any human desires: a species of mental annihilation. Certainly, to judge of its effects on the priests, the practice of Buddhism appears to have a most debasing influence. They have, nearly all of them, an expression approaching to idiocy, which is probably acquired in that dreamy state in which one of their most famous professors is said to have passed nine years, with his eyes fixed upon a wall! They say, with reference to their systems of moral retribution, that what a man receives now is an indication of his conduct in a former state; and that he may augur his future condition by his behaviour in this life. The merit, however, would seem to consist as much in inaction as action: in the abstinence from

evil, or the mere self-infliction of pain, rather than in the practice of good. They make up an account with heaven, and demand the balance in bliss, or pay it by sufferings and penances of their own, just like the papists of Europe.” *

The next witness is from an intelligent Scotsman who resided eleven years in Ceylon:

"During the continuance of the festival, the priests of Buddha seemed to think it incumbent on them to perambulate the town with their begging dishes, and to go through the ceremony of receiving alms. They moved on slowly with their fans before their faces, occasionally halting to receive whatever food was offered them, but not asking for it. It appeared to me that this was more of a temporary penance than a regular practice, although to live by alms is enjoined by the rules of their order. Their sleek faces and sly looks spoke of better fare procured elsewhere with less trouble and more certainty than wandering in heavy rain through Kandy, and waiting for supplies from the more devout portion of those professing the Buddhist religion." †

Very sad, all this! but it could not be otherwise; for neither in Ceylon nor in Canton, or elsewhere, do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. So long as reverence is not firmly wedded to reason, religion can never exist without a certain alloy of nonsense, nor morality become altogether identified with Nature in a creature with whom Truth is the one proper law, Love the one seemly inspiration, and Energy, according to truth and love, the chief end of his existence.

"The Chinese," by J. F. Davis. London: Knight, 1840, p. 219. "Eleven Years in Ceylon," by Forbes, vol. i. pp. 312 and 301.

CHAPTER VI.

A

THE ATHEISM OF REACTION.

Φάσκοντες εἶναι σοφοὶ ἐμωράνθησαν.

ST. PAUL.

CTION AND REACTION ARE EQUAL AND CON

TRARY: so I was taught many years ago in the Natural Philosophy class, Marischal College, Aberdeen; and through a long life have had constant occasion to note the general correctness and wide applicability of the sentence. It is the nature of every force, in a world made up of a rich variety of opposing forces, either to be stopped in its action altogether as the advancing tide by a rocky coast

or to be sent back on its own traces, as we see in the heavings to and fro of a great crowd of people, when the over-pressure in one direction produces a stronger pressure in the opposite direction, till some sort of comfortable adjustment be achieved in which the jostled thousands may breathe

N

freely. So it is exactly in the great intellectual and moral movements of society, which constitute the marked epochs of history. It is impossible to live the space of a single generation in the world without seeing striking instances of this sort of propulsion and revulsion of sentiment pass before our eyes. What has become now, for instance, of that grand burst of classical enthusiasm which, some half-a-century ago, sent Lord Byron and some score of adventurous Britons on the romantic expedition of driving the Turk out of Greece, and reconstituting a kingdom of Greek-speaking men, beneath the white majesty of the Periclean Parthenon? The Greek is now, in John Bull's estimate, only a merchant of very sharp practice, and nothing Our old ally, the Turk, has suffered under a similar swing of the pendulum; and the Russophoby of some thirty or forty years ago is now veering round to the Russophile point of the political compass, and accustoming itself to look with a grand cosmopolitan sympathy even on the probability of a speedy settlement of the great Arctic bear on the tip of the Golden Horn. Take, again, the department of Art. Look into any of the great English cathedrals, and say what you see there. The internal walls of an edifice of an essentially

more.

Gothic type stuck over all round with monuments and other decorations, in the pure Greek, or composite Italo-Roman style, as unlike to what one should expect there, as a tree would be which, growing up so high on the type of a white-stemmed birch, flinging its tresses lightly on the breeze, should suddenly alter its style, and end in the ruddy arms and dark-green needles of a Scottish pine. What was the cause of this? Simply the reaction from the Gothic style of the Middle Ages, and the rage of admiration which possessed Europe for everything that could boast the prestige of Greek and Roman kinship. In the architectural books of those days, you will find the Gothic style of church, college, or cottage, on which we now pride ourselves, simply noted as a barbarism, which a cultivated taste will look at to avoid. And a similar phenomenon may be observed in every form of physical, moral, and intellectual life; so that we may almost lay it down as a historical proposition of universal validity: every social state sooner or later begets its contrary; and that not only by the natural power of recoil which we see in springs and other elastic bodies, but from the mere love of novelty. In poetry this is particularly remarkable. When Pope's poetry of sparkling antithesis, sonorous swell, and shrewd condensation