Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ is not a Buddhist _magnum opus_; it is an ephemeral popular book written by a simple Protestant Englishman who has lost what relics of doctrine he once possessed but still preserves a fine dislike of the Papacy. His attraction to Gautama Buddha as much resembles that of an Indian mystic as his style resembles the prose of Voltaire. When he tells us with approval that Buddhism regards the desire for Immortality as an evil and the loss of being (for impersonal being is not being at all) as a good, he tells us what is undoubtedly true: though in the strong light of Western thought, obviously a muddlement—for there must be being, and conscious being, and discrete being, if there is to be the sense of joy or of good. But however much Mr. Wells pats Buddha on the back he will persuade no one that he is a Buddhist with a yearning desire to have done with notoriety and the flesh. What of Mr. Wells’s desire (which he earnestly presents to his readers) to be rid of Mr. Wells’s own immortal soul? It is pretty clear on page 242 what he feels in the matter of Immortality. He praises the Buddhist Atheism in this particular, because he dislikes “an endless continuation” of his “mean little individual life,” which in his judgment is man’s conception of Immortality, whether in the Egyptian whom he mentions by name, or in the Christian whom he really has in mind. Now there is in this profession of dislike for the doctrine of Immortality, and ridicule of it, a positive element beyond the negative element of mere opposition to Catholicism and to the high tradition of Europe. The positive element is the very natural distaste for following on the dreary round of suburban life in London or New York; and in this our Author is to be applauded. But it is characteristic of him and of the time and audience in which and for which he writes, that he should have had any such appalling conception of the profound and majestic dogma of Immortality. It exactly corresponds to what the same type of thought produces when it _demands_ Immortality instead of denying it. The present-day English Modernist, who writes a book saying that he has had communication with his son killed during the War, and that the son is drinking whiskies and sodas and smoking cigars in Purgatory or Paradise (whichever you like to call the fashionable idea of the next world), is in exactly the same mental state as Mr. Wells. Certainly, if the dogma of Immortality (that very summit of the dignity of man and characteristic of all our race and its achievements) meant an endless succession of going up by train to the office and reading the _Daily Howl_ on the way, we should be better without it. But it does not mean that, Mr. Wells; I assure you it does not. There is far more glory about Immortality and far more elbow-room—and far more peril.