also summoned the brethren, was the monk of the longest standing among them. So far it seemed to anticipate our principle of Presbyterian parity, but, like Convocation, it was an exclusively ecclesiastical gathering, for neither nun, nor novice, nor layman was allowed to be present. Like our presbyteries when applying their privy censures, they expected to be “alone.” Then, when all were reverentially placed, in presence of no heart-searching God, but before one another, there was recited by the president the order of confessional, according to the rule that if there was no transgression there was no interruption, and silence indicated innocence. First came the recitation of the gravest offences: the four Pârâgikâ renounced upon their admission, commission of any one of which involved expulsion from the Order. Then came the list of the less serious transgressions—Samghâdisesas, involving temporary degradation, and lastly that of the Pâkittya, or venial faults, which were atoned for by simple confession. It was a lengthy, minute, ill-arranged form of inquisition, more comprehensive and rigid than any catechism of the confessional which Romanism ever devised.[295] It out-phariseed the Pharisees in its trivialities and repetitions and straining out of gnats, and no manual of the cloister ever discovered, could equal its disgusting details of every conceivable form of unnatural vice supposed to be perpetrable by the brethren.[296] It reads more like a suggestion to sin than a defence against temptation. We can understand from it alone, how impossible it was for Buddhism to live up to its true principles, how incapable it was of urging on the steady moral progress of the race, and of even realising the example of its founder. Life’s whole strength was wasted in watching against petty and artificial transgressions, so that none was available for the prosecution of real duty. Yet if deliverance was to come by the law, the most trivial details of action had to be tried; but here, as elsewhere, by the law was only the knowledge of sin, and that not as an offence against an infinitely Holy One, but only as a misfortune, or at worst an imprudence, a stumbling-block placed by man himself in the way of advancing his interest.