In visiting a certain village I dined with several clergymen. One told me he was the Catholic priest, and invited me to visit his chapel. Not long after I met another clergyman. I do not recall his denomination, but his work he told me was undoing that of the Catholic priest. The latter converted the people to Catholicism, while the former tried to reclaim them from Catholicism. I heard much about our joss-houses, but they fade into insignificance when compared with the splendid religious palaces of the Americans, and particularly those of the Catholics and Episcopalians. Their religious customs are beyond belief. As an illustration, their religion teaches them that the dead, if they have led a good life, go at once to heaven, though the Catholics believe in a purgatory, a half-way house, out of which the dead can be bought by the payment of money. Now the simple Chinaman would naturally believe that the relatives would be pleased at the death of a friend who was _immediately_ transported to paradise and freed from the worries of life, but not at all; at the death of a relative the friends are plunged into such grief that they have been known to hire professional mourners, and instead of putting on clothes indicative of joy and thanksgiving array themselves in somber black, the token of woe, and wear it for years. Everything is black, and the more fashionable the family the deeper the black. The deepest crape is worn by the women. Writing-paper is inscribed with a deep band, also visiting cards. Women use jet as jewelry, and white pearls are replaced by black ones. Even servants are garbed in mourning for the departed, who, they believe, have gone to the most beautiful paradise possible to conceive. Contemplating all these inconsistencies one is amazed, and the amazement is ever increasing as one delves deeper into the ways of the inconsistent American. The credulity of the American is nowhere more singularly shown than in his susceptibility to religion. At a dinner given by the ---- of ---- in Washington, conversation turned on religion, and Senator ----, a very clever man, told me in a burst of confidence, "Our people are easily led; it merely requires a leader, a bright, audacious man, with plenty of 'cheek,' to create a following." There are hundreds of examples of this statement. No matter how idiotic the religion or philosophy may be, a following can be established among Americans. A man of the name of Dowie, "ignorant, impertinent, but with a superabundance of cheek" (I quote an American journal), announced himself as the prophet Elijah, and obtained a following of thousands, built a large city, and lives upon the credulity of the public.