"To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock," seems to have been the chief business of the founder. Thus is he always represented cross-legged and contemplative, with eyes downcast, "cleaving with the thunderbolt of science the mountain of ignorance," and perceiving the illusory nature of all things. So he comes at last to that state in which he breaks the bonds binding him to existence and enters into the complete Nirvana. In this religion pity is pre-eminent, for it is sympathy with suffering. But it does not confine itself to human beings. Animals are also to share our sympathies, and here we meet with the foundation of Wagner's idea in "Parsifal" of the sacredness of the life of dumb creatures in the realms of the Holy Grail. But now let us see how Wagner works out his jumble of religious and philosophic doctrines. Parsifal is a pure fool. Weigh that, first of all. He knows nothing; yet when he enters the flower-garden he compliments the women on their beauty, and fails to understand what they want of him. O wise young judge! this pure fool, who does not know what is the matter with Amfortas, and therefore has no desire to aid him, must be enlightened by pity. So Wagner sets Kundry to work to tell him the story of his mother's sufferings, and she ends the narration by printing a long kiss upon his lips. Wagner was fond of long kisses set to music, and he used one in "Siegfried" as an awakener. Now what happens? This salacious kiss of an unchaste woman, imprinted on the lips of a youth who was, according to Wagner's delineation of him, as innocent as a child of eight or ten, instantly opens up to him the entire experience of Amfortas, and fills him with pity and horror! That is, indeed, a miracle. And to make the thing psychologically more absurd, Wagner shows us this "pure fool" battling madly with the simultaneous working of these two emotions. What has become of the enlightenment by pity? Plainly the enlightenment comes first and the pity afterward! Furthermore, Parsifal prays to the Redeemer for forgiveness for his failure to understand the scene in the hall of the Grail. But, as H. E. Krehbiel pertinently asked in an article in the "New York Tribune," what could the boy have done when he had not yet got the sacred spear from Klingsor? What a hold, then, the Buddhistic ideas, toward which Wagner was led by Schopenhauer, had taken upon him! The religion of the crucial scene of the drama is not Christian at all. The outward and visible signs of the scene are purely pagan, but the underlying philosophy is Buddhistic. It is the final issue of the dreams which this master visionary had in his mind when he planned "The Victors." The only remnant of Christian story in this act is the reminiscence of the drama which Wagner once planned relating to the Saviour.