Mr. Wells ends this excursion against the Catholic Church (for that is what his new-found enthusiasm for Buddhism really means) by a passage on page 250 in the very best traditions of the “No Popery” lecturers of my youth. Buddhism caught “almost every disease of corrupt religions: idols, temples, altars, and censers.” It is a funny list, with a horrible bathos on the word censers. Idols mean images; altar means altar all right; temples mean buildings put up with care and made as beautiful as possible—or at least what the putter-up thinks beautiful—in honour of the thing worshipped. But censers are only things in which you burn incense; and though they are an excellent adjunct to liturgy, they really have not the importance which Mr. Wells, in common with most Kensitites, attaches to them. I assure him I could get on perfectly well without incense. On the other hand, I could not get on without an altar; and a lack of images in a Christian church would seem to me very deplorable: a sort of empty, hungry, mean, absence of a very proper and natural religious function which, if there be a true religion, would certainly be found attached to that religion. Then we have, just before the end of all the affair, the weary old business copied from Gibbon, and much older than Gibbon, “What would Christ and His apostles think of High Mass at St. Peter’s”? (By the way, Low Mass in Huddersfield is just as much to the purpose as High Mass in St. Peter’s.) Only here it is not High Mass at St. Peter’s shocking the Creator of the Catholic Church, but a Buddhist ceremony shocking poor Buddha. But more important than his ignorance of Huc’s testimony of other special points is his complete failure to set down the prime contrast between Catholicism and Buddhism: that the latter is founded on Despair. _That_ is the whole point. It is _that_ which makes between the living Church which Jesus Christ founded and the negative philosophy of Asia a difference of day and night. Mr. Wells does not omit this essential point from malice: he does it from ignorance. His whole account of essential Buddhism takes for granted that it is the religion he himself holds—a highly rarefied Protestantism. But to fall into such an error as that is like taking vitriol for water. CHAPTER IX MR. WELLS AND THE INCARNATION As I approach what is much the most important section of Mr. Wells’s book (for it deals with much the most important subject in all History—I mean the Incarnation, which he so cheerfully denies), I must, not without regret, be too brief upon preliminaries, lest I should take up the space necessary for the larger controversy later on.