They spoke of plague and cholera and famine and wretched sanitation and cruelties unspeakable. But they did not understand me when I told them that the teeming millions of Hindu peasantry somehow manage to enjoy their careless lives to the full, and are really much more satisfied than the European peasants or the small American farmers. I did not argue: I simply stated facts. But I discovered that it is a titanic, heart-breaking task to prove the absurdity of anything which the Christians have made up their minds to accept as true. I found arrayed against me an iron phalanx of preconceived opinions and misconstrued lessons of history. I began to understand that even amongst educated people there can exist opinion without thought, and that my two arch-foes were the Pharisee intolerance which is the caste-mark and the blighting curse of the Christian the world over, and the other Aryan vice: an unconscious generalization of those ideas which have been adopted for the sake of convenience and self-flattery, and in strict and delightfully naïve disregard of truth. The whole I found to be spiced with religious hypocrisy; and is there a lower form of hypocrisy than that which makes a man pretend for his own material or spiritual purposes that a thing is good which in his inmost heart he knows to be bad? The sincerity of such people is on a par with that of him who, being debarred by a doctor from constant drinking, proclaims that he is a reformed character and prates to his friends about the delights of temperance. I learned that to fathom the murky depths of stupidity and intolerance of the Christians of to-day, we should have a latter-day Moses Maimonides amongst us, to write another _Moreh Nebukim_, another _Guide for the Perplexed_. And then I made up my mind to attack that structure of ignorance and misunderstanding, that jumble of generalization and hyperdeduction, that idiotic racial self-confidence and national self-consciousness which breeds Pharisee intolerance, which destroys individual inquiry and unprejudiced opinion, and which sounds the death-knell of procreativeness. The Hindu peasants say that it is a mistake to judge the quality of a whole field of rice by testing one grain only. But the Europeans, the Americans, who judge us have never even tested a solitary grain and only know about its quality from hearsay. Not that they are afraid to voice what they miscall their opinions. Only instead of having the courage of their own convictions, they have the courage of somebody else’s convictions, not knowing that the most obtuse ignorance is superior to dangerous, second-hand knowledge.