I told once an Indian story which marks out clearly what is superstition. There was once a very holy man in the habit of offering a sacrifice by pouring butter into the fire—one of the ordinary Hindū ceremonies. Morning after morning he duly performed this rite. He was much admired by his neighbours, and the regularity of the discharge of his religious duties led them to consider him a model worthy of imitation. This good man happened to have a cat. As he was kindly-hearted and affectionate, the cat loved him, and used to come up and interrupt his religious service; so he put a collar round the cat and tied it to the bedpost to prevent interruptions. Time went on, a few generations passed, and then all of the people who copied this admirable saint not only offered the sacrifice, but also considered it a part of the rite to have a cat tied to the bedpost. Still more time went on, until at last all that remained of the original ceremony was the cat tied to the bedpost and nothing else. Now there is superstition: the harmless accessory had become necessary, until it occupied the whole of the worshippers’ minds. This is often the case in religions which have lasted long, and have had many ignorant adherents. They cannot distinguish between the inner meaning and the outer form; and gradually the outer form becomes everything, and the inner meaning disappears. Then comes the time when, superstition having taken the place of truth, there rises up the critical intellect of man, attacks the whole, and challenges the authority. Only sometimes the critic is not evolved enough to recognise the truth at the same time that he wars against the error. More often he takes the whole as superstition and tries to destroy it completely. There you have the history of many reformations. Take the great Reformation of the sixteenth century. If you look back to that you will see that an enormous amount of valuable truth was thrown aside in trying to get rid of the surface error with which the truth had been covered. And so in tracing down the growth of the Puritan spirit from the time of Luther, through Calvinistic Switzerland, up to Scotland with John Knox, and then looking at it as it spread over England, and became so powerful under James I. and Charles I., you will recognise that in the whole of that there is a gradual throwing away of everything that the mind could not grasp and understand, and consequently a great loss of the spiritual side of things. The result of that historically has been that the truth that was thrown away in the getting rid of the error came back again a little later. And so with certain fundamental tendencies in man, against which the Puritan of that time set himself utterly—the use of images in public worship, the use of music, the use of garments different from the everyday garments, and so on—all these points that he threw aside as part of the Papal abomination came back again, slowly, steadily, gradually spreading through the whole