There again is an irresistible occasion for our anti-Christian: though, with characteristic muddle-headedness, he does not see that he is using it in contradiction to the first opportunity. Just as Buddhism is an obvious weapon to use against the Catholic Church on the lines, “Look what a much better thing the rival religion is”! So it can be used the other way about, “Look at this degraded religion, and see what a lot you have in common with it”! The contradiction is resolved, of course, by the very simple dodge of saying that the good Buddhism which is so superior to the Faith of civilized men, the maker of Europe, is “the simple, pure, original Buddhism”—in plain English, the Protestant Buddhism—while the developed Buddhism is the naughty, “ritualist,” Buddhism. And as the original Buddhism seems to have differed in doctrine and idea from the later Buddhism, the opportunity of saying “Modern Buddhism is a corruption of a simple original: therefore Catholicism is a similar corruption,” seems too good to be missed. Mr. Wells (as we shall see in a later article) shirks the essential point, whether the Catholic Church _is as a fact_ of different substance to-day from what it was at its origins. He prefers to put forward the false Buddhist parallel, and let it work in minds as ill-instructed as his own. Thus we poor Christian remnants catch it both ways. “Buddhism is a degraded man-made thing, full of ceremonies and perverse human imaginings—look how like it is to the Catholic Church, and judge from that what a perverse, man-made thing is the Catholic Church also! At the same time, Buddhism is a supremely noble doctrine, especially in its denial of a personal God and of the immortality of the human soul. Judge from that how degraded you Catholics are with your absurd ideas of a personal God and of the immortality of the human soul”! The reader who turns to Mr. Wells’s chapter, “The Rise and Spread of Buddhism,” in Book IV (beginning with page 237), will appreciate what I mean. Within a brief twenty-three pages, more than half of which, I think, are illustrations, he manages to put the whole anti-Catholic emotion (by innuendo) in the fullest fashion, and not only to do that, but to sacrifice common sense (as fanaticism must always sacrifice common sense) in the process. On page 241 you get the note of the whole thing, “the teaching of History, as we are unfolding it in this book,” says Mr. Wells, “is strictly in accordance with this teaching of Buddha”: that is an example of what I mean. It is childish, not only as vanity in the Author, but as praise of a great, though perverted, philosophy.