But it is not in an attitude of resistance only that Buddhism confronts Christianity even in the East. In Ceylon, if we are to trust the _Times of India_,[16] it numbers among its typical gains “a young highly educated European lady and a clergyman of the English Church,” and these, it is averred, “are not the first, and are not likely to be the last of its direct converts from the Christian churches.” In Europe and America also, not among the lower and less educated, but among the higher ranks of society, among people affecting culture and new light, are to be found not a few professing admirers, if not practical followers, of Buddha and his law. The admiration of many of these dilettanti may sometimes be found to be in exact proportion to their ignorance of Buddhism. Their information is drawn almost exclusively from such sources as are supplied by the romance of Sir Edwin Arnold and works like those produced by Mr. Sinnett and Colonel Olcott;[17] but even when we discount all these, we must own that here and there we find some thoughtful and earnest people who profess to have come out from bondage to the beggarly elements of the Church’s faith to gentle Buddha’s better gospel of liberty. Mr. Alabaster’s _Modern Buddhist_ finds a co-religionist not only in the disciples of Feuerbach and Von Hartmann, but in every “fervent atheist” who, acknowledging nothing in the universe save man, and a system of unbending law in which he is involved, and with which he is sometimes confounded, has been compelled to deify humanity and to demand for its idol a service worthy of a divine object of faith.