In like manner, in more modern times the early missionaries in the far east learned with amazement of the way in which, in the mountains of Thibet, the devil had made his imitation of the ceremonies and offices of the Catholic Church, and wondered as they heard of the Buddhist monasteries with their abbots and hierarchy of clergy, and the celebration there of mysterious offices strangely resembling their own mass, to the sound of bells and amid the smoke of incense. In our own day an even wider area opens before [p.64 ]the historian's vision, and across five continents men trace, under various forms, rites whose origin seems the same. It is not now the devil who is credited with inspiring these myriad devices, but perhaps not a few of the students who return with Dr. Frazer from the survey of this vast field are inclined to feel that they have reduced all alike to one origin, in primitive savage superstition at work in the presence of life, birth and death. But if Tertullian and his school lack charity in their judgment on the sacraments of the heathen, there is surely danger too that our modern men of science may lead us to believe that in tracing a custom to its primitive origin they have found its cause or explained its nature. We can under- stand a thing best, not merely by knowing its beginning, but by also viewing it in its full development, judged not only by what it is at its lowest, or when it is most degraded, but at its highest and best. The world-wide use points surely to a world-wide need, expressing itself in different ways, but in essentials the same. Unconsciously, indeed, in all our lives we make use of sacraments whenever we apprehend the invisible and the higher through the medium of the visible and lower. And, in our very thoughts, metaphors and symbols are nothing else than sacraments expressing truth in pictorial form. Even when men deliberately attempt to explain all life on a basis of atheistic materialism they still feel the need of what might [p.65] truly be called a kind of sacrament. It is very significant from this point of view to find that some French secularists have found it desirable to publish a ritual of civil ceremonies, [15] in which model liturgies are provided for a secular baptism, a secular confirmation service, as well as secular marriage and burial services. A conscious recognition of this same need led Auguste Comte and his Positivist followers to devise an elaborate ritual which might make their worship of Humanity more real. The Society of Friends itself, which is popularly supposed to represent a protest against all forms of sacraments, can illustrate in its history the value of the true sacrament, and the danger there is of doing worship to the form of the sacrament, rather than to the life which makes it of worth.