They are certainly good-natured hearers, and give the preacher a fair chance. To see them sitting on their heels, or on the ground, placidly smoking their cheroots, and looking intently, nodding the head occasionally, and interjecting, “Hoakba, Hoakba” (true, true), one might go away with the idea that they had intelligently taken in the whole discourse, but it does not do to be too sanguine about that. It has to be taken into account that though they may understand the words used, they are sure at first to understand them in a Buddhist sense; and there is such a great deal that is absolutely new to them in Christianity, so many strange names and unfamiliar ideas, that the subject matter of the discourse is by no means easy for them to understand. We are much more liable to underrate than to overrate the difficulty all heathen people have in understanding Christian preaching, at the first. In addressing them on the subject of religion we must use religious terms. But unfortunately those terms have already a Buddhist meaning clinging to them, which is widely different from the Christian sense; and the higher the truths to which we are seeking to give expression, the greater is the difficulty of putting the meaning into the words at our disposal. How are you to get a Buddhist to realise, for example, any adequate notion of the Divine Being, when he has no such conception in his own religion? True, there is the word “Paya,” and that is the word we have to use. But what meaning does that word convey to a Buddhist? It means primarily Buddha himself, and the philologists tell us that it is that name in another dress. But Buddha never claimed to be God. He was a sage, philosopher, religious reformer, ascetic, who lived and died, and, according to Buddhist teaching, passed into Nirvana, five centuries before Christ. “Paya” may mean also the image of Buddha; or it may be applied to the shrine in which the image is placed; or it may be applied—alas! for the degradation of human language—to you, or to me, or to any person, Burman or European, whom, for the time being, it is worth while to treat with rather a special degree of respect. Which of these meanings attaching to this Burmese word “Paya” brings us even a single step towards the true conception of the Christian revelation of God? And yet, inadequate as it is, it is all the name there is for us to use. Even the familiar term “man,” about which it might seem there could hardly be two opinions, is subject to the same difficulty, when it comes to be used in a theological and religious sense. What with the doctrines of transmigration, and _karma_, which, as we have already seen, the Burmans all firmly believe, the real nature, and circumstances, and final destiny of human beings, as we have to teach these truths, are all new and strange to their minds.