But to return to the use of Buddhism as a stick to beat the Catholic Church with. After the glorification of the pure doctrine we get the “awful example” business of the ritual. First we are told (on page 244) that it was the fate of Gautama to have marvellous falsehoods told about him—as has been the fate of “most religious founders” since his days. That word “most” means, of course, Jesus Christ. There have not been a crowd of religious founders since 500 B.C., and all this innuendo in the description of Buddhism is an innuendo delivered at the Faith. On the same page, a little further on, there is the sneer, “of course it was impossible to believe that Buddha was the son of a mortal father.” That is a sneer at the Incarnation, as is the sentence a few lines further on, “a theology grew up about the Buddha. He was discovered to be a God.” Then on the next page there is the familiar taunt against the titles of affection and veneration given to Our Lady. A certain Eastern goddess is Queen of the Sea, so Mr. Wells must put in quite gratuitously and out of place the words “Stella Maris,” which some very learned man has told him means “Star of the Sea.” Then there is a completely misleading quotation from Huc. The misleading is no doubt unconscious, for I very much doubt whether Mr. Wells has ever read Huc; he is probably depending upon what he may have heard vaguely on the matter in conversation. At any rate, the grossly misleading character of the passage must be pointed out. He quotes Huc’s interesting description of the similarities between Christian (or Catholic) and Buddhist liturgical details, and puts the whole thing in a completely false light by using the word “perplexing.” He says, “We read in Huc’s travels” how “_perplexing_” he found “all these things,” the innuendo being that Catholics regard ritual as the soul of their religion and are disturbed in their Faith on finding foreign analogies to it. No doubt Mr. Wells was told by those who coached him that the Abbé Huc was thrown into an agony of doubt by finding Buddhist ceremonies so like our own. But he would have done well to verify the point. It was foolish in him not to do so. I know the passage well: there is not a word in it about Huc being perplexed. Why should he be? There is not an indication in Huc’s style or tone in the matter that he was perplexed. He noted with great interest the very exact correspondence between many details of ritual—down to such a tiny point as the chains and cover of the Thurible—and he gives a lucid, probable, learned and very rational account of when and how the later Buddhism may have copied such things (p. 112, Vol. II, of the third edition).