In connection with the placing of too great a reliance upon the "letter" of venerated records, a warning--serious enough if we appropriate it to ourselves--has issued from the pen of the Rev. Spence Hardy, who, in a passage of his book, entitled _Eastern Monachism_ (p. 166), emphasizes with tremendous force the precarious position of those who take their stand solely upon sacred books. "The priests of India," he writes, "are encompassed by weapons that may be wrested from their hands and used to their own destruction. When it is clearly proved to them that their venerated records contain absurdities and contradictions, they must of necessity conclude that their origin cannot have been divine; and, the foundations of the system being thus shaken, the whole mass must speedily fall, leaving only the unsightly ruin as a monument of man's folly, when he endeavours to form a religion from the feculence of his own corrupt heart or the fancies of his own perverted imagination." It may be apposite here to demonstrate how far short of the Pauline standard the cultivated European critic falls, by referring to some remarks of the Rev. Prof. Bruce in one of his Gifford Lectures[A] of last year, in which he treats of Gotama's views concerning the moral order of the universe. Of the two leading doctrines of Buddhism, Karma is called by him "fantastic" and Nirvana "morbid"; and, not content with such a contemptuous dismissal of these remarkable conceptions, he proceeds to say: "The well-being of the race demanded warriors, brave in the field of battle against evil, not monks, immured in cloisters and passing their lives in poverty, wearing the yellow robe of a mendicant order." [A] _Vide Glasgow Herald_, January, 1898. This rhetorical flourish may have sounded very effective and convincing as a peroration, and have produced the desired result of clearing the lecturer from any possible imputation of sympathy with Buddhism, except as an ethical system of considerable excellence; but such a summing-up of Buddhism is neither more nor less than a throwing of dust in the eyes of beholders, and is, in my opinion, very far removed from the dispassionate survey one would expect from a Gifford Lecturer. Alighting on such a misrepresentation of his religious system, a Buddhist would naturally feel aggrieved, and his belief in our self-adopted reputation for fair-play all round might be rudely shaken.