Occultism, Esoteric Buddhism, which professes to supplant the religion of Jesus, and to prepare the way of the twelfth of the Messiahs, whose mission is to harmonise the perverted teaching of his predecessors,[21] and thus establish the universal religion of humanity, is not likely to occasion serious concern. It is just another of those instances in which the diseases of a lower civilisation are communicated to one superior and more robust. Just as plagues originating in the ruined or degraded populations of the East have repeatedly desolated large portions of Europe, where they found physical conditions favourable to their spread, so there are mental and moral epidemics which, generated among inferior religions, propagate themselves in the very highest, for reasons almost similar. There are modern conditions which present very close affinities to those out of which Buddhism arose. It has been truly called the religion of despair, and it seems suited to that intellectual _ennui_ in which many profess to live who find themselves confronted by problems which they are unable to solve. The enervating agnosticism and sentimental pessimism of our generation furnish the very soil in which the germs of Buddhism are most likely to mature; but the spiritual life of Christendom is too robust to succumb to its heresy of inertion and moral defeat. The system of Buddha, even as laid out by himself, is not at all likely to entrap any considerable number of Western nineteenth-century thinkers; and this mongrel system of Neo-Buddhism, though professing to be founded on that ancient creed, will only find adherents among peculiar people. There is always a tendency in the most advanced civilisation, on the part of some who are freed from the necessity of industry, so essential to man’s mental and moral as well as to his physical health, to revert to beliefs and customs peculiar to earlier and inferior stages of culture. It is a curious and significant fact,[22] that not among the working and professional classes, but among the upper and fashionable ranks of modern society, such survivals of ancient superstition as intercourse with spirits and palmistry are chiefly now to be found. For such unstable souls as have been or may be tempted to be drawn into these practices by an appeal to the authority of the beautiful character limned for our generation in the _Light of Asia_, I know no better restorative than a plain exposition of primitive Buddhism. It will be seen then that this modern fungus is a growth almost as foreign in its nature to real Buddhism as it is to true Christianity. The degenerate Buddhism from which it borrows its largest stock of ideas bears the same relation to the actual teaching of Buddha that the Cabbala bear to the prophecies of the Old Testament, and the doctrines which it counts upon as most popular and attractive are precisely those which Buddha would have treated with his most withering scorn.