Further, I thought if this is true with the Burman, is it not likely to be true of all people? I know that a creed, a religious theory, is no guide to the belief of a people. If it were, would not all Christian nations believe much the same, have the same ideals, the same outcome of their beliefs? But they do not. They vary in a most extraordinary way. Each people has its own beliefs, and no one agrees with another on more than one or two points. And not one at all agrees with the theories they profess. Now as every European nation has the same holy book, the same Teacher, the same Example, how is this? Can it be explained by arguing from the creed down? No. But may be it can by reasoning from the people up. It may be that I shall find elsewhere what I have found here, that creeds do not influence people, but people their creeds, and that where the creed will not give way the people simply ignore it. Each people may have its own instinctive beliefs from within differing from all others. And because they require a theory to explain, and as it were codify, these instincts, they adopt nominally some great creed, but with the reservation that in practice they will follow that creed only where it meets or can be made to meet their necessities, and ignore it where it does not. That may work out. Let me study mankind to find what they believe. This I have tried to do, and what I have found comes in the next chapters, but no one who has not tried knows how difficult it has been; for I have found no one to help me, no facts hardly, except what I myself might gather to go on. Books on religion and on folk-lore there are in plenty. They have been of little use to me. They all begin at the wrong end. They all assume as facts what I do not think exist at all. They talk, for instance, of Christianity as if in practice there is now or ever has been any such clear or definite thing. There is Roman Catholicism of different forms, the ideas of the Latin races; there are the many religions of the Slavs, of the Teutons, of the Anglo-Saxons, of the Iberians, of the western Celts, all differing enormously, all calling themselves Christian. There is the religion of the Boers, of the Quakers, of the Abyssinians, of the Unitarians. There used to be the Puritans, the Fifth Monarchy men, the Arians, and many another heresy. They call themselves Christians. What are their real beliefs? Whence do they come? It is the same with Buddhism. There are the Burmese, Ceylon, Chinese, Japanese, Jain, Thibetan, and many another people that call themselves Buddhist. What are the real beliefs of these people? I have found the Burmese beliefs; who has found the others? The answer is, no one has even looked for them. They have started at the very end and reasoned down; they have coloured the facts with their theories till they are worthless.