The Wahabite reformer, we are told by Palgrave, preached that there were only two deadly sins: paying divine honours to any creature of Allah’s, and smoking tobacco; and that murder, adultery, and such like trivial matters, were minor offences which a merciful Allah would condone. He held also that of the whole inhabitants of the world all would surely be damned, except one out of the seventy-two sects of Mahometans, who held the true faith and dwelt in the district of Riad. This illustrates the insane extremes into which all human speculations run, if a single idea—in this case that of awe, reverence, and abject submission in presence of an almighty power—is allowed to run its course without check and obtain undue preponderance. Apart from these extreme instances we may say that the two religious theories which have survived to the present day in the struggle for existence, are monotheism and pantheism. Pantheism is, in the main, the creed of half the human race—of the teeming millions of India, China, Japan, Ceylon, Thibet, Siam, and Burmah. How deeply it is rooted in their conceptions was very forcibly impressed on me in a conversation I had on board one of the P. and O. steamers with an English missionary returning from China. He told me how he had dined one evening with an intelligent Chinese merchant, and after dinner they walked in the garden discussing religious subjects, and he tried to impress on his host the first principles of the Christian religion. It was a starlight night, and for sole reply the Chinese gentleman stretched his hand to the heavens and said, ‘Do you mean to tell me all that is dead—do you take me for a fool?’ The Chinese ‘illative sense’ was as absolute in its conclusions for pantheism, as that of Cardinal Newman for theism. In fact pantheism, though not the whole truth, and almost as inconsistent as polytheism with the real facts of the universe as disclosed by science, has a certain poetical truth in it, to which chords of human emotion vibrate responsively, and is perhaps not so widely in error as some of the extreme theories which treat matter as something base and brutal. Wordsworth’s noble lines— A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion, and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, And rolls through all things— are pure pantheism, and yet we cannot but feel ourselves to a great extent in sympathy with them. So also the well-known lines of a greater than Wordsworth, Shakespeare, are pure Buddhism: