society continues to subsist with all its exterior characteristics; the various steps of its hierarchy are as well marked and defined now as they were before under more favourable circumstances. Its framework remains entire, but the materials composing it are somewhat imperfect and unsound. There is in that religious body a latent principle of vitality, that keeps it up and communicates to it an amount of strength and energy that have hitherto maintained it in the midst of wars, revolutions, and political convulsions of all descriptions. Whether supported or not by the ruling power, it has remained always firm and unchanged. It is impossible to account satisfactorily for such a phenomenon, unless we find a clear and evident cause of such an extraordinary vitality; a cause independent of ordinary occurrences, time, and circumstances; a cause deeply rooted in the very soul of the populations, that exhibit before the observer this great and striking religious feature. That cause appears to be the strong religious sentiment, the firm faith that pervades the masses of Buddhists. The laity admire and venerate the religious, and voluntarily and cheerfully contribute to their maintenance and welfare. From its ranks the religious body is constantly recruited. There is scarcely a man that has not been a member of the fraternity for a certain period of time. Surely such a general and continued impulse could not last long, unless it were maintained by a powerful religious conviction. The members of the order preserve, at least exteriorly, the decorum of their profession. The rules and regulations are tolerably well observed; the grades of hierarchy are maintained with a scrupulous exactitude. The life of the religious is one of restraint and perpetual control. He is denied all sorts of pleasures and diversions. How could such system of self-denial be ever maintained, were it not for the belief which the Rahans have in the merits that they amass, by following a course of life which, after all, is repugnant to nature? It cannot be denied that human motives often influence both the laity and the religious, but divested of faith and of the sentiments inspired by even a false belief, their action could not produce, in a lasting and persevering manner, the extraordinary and striking fact we witness in Buddhistic countries. ARTICLE IV. ORDINATION, OR CEREMONIES OBSERVED AT THE ADMISSION INTO THE SOCIETY.