In our Western world we are confronted with innumerable obstacles in the way of leading the ideal, or Christ-like, life. The ideal _life-germ_ is in all of us, but too often hidden away under the veneer of respectability, and much obscured by conventionalities. This germ, if not very apparent in our public capacity, is distinctly discernible in the family life as typical of these islands. We see it in the eyes of the wife, in the restraint of the son, and we listen to it in the voices of our daughters. It struggles hard to develop itself in the face of stupendous difficulties. Its growth among our spiritual leaders is frequently handicapped by the isolating effects of aggrandizement. A cardinal, for instance--good and gracious as he invariably is--must always be more or less inaccessible and appalling. Our charities, too, are vitiated by ostentation. Prospectuses demand that a royalty should take the lead, and the titled figure as patrons, if the appeal made is designed to be irresistible. So that, to whichever side we turn, we find ourselves hampered in our aspirations towards the ideal by the exigencies of society, by our customs and absurdities. Turning to the far East, we are face to face with other conditions, which undoubtedly lend themselves more readily to the impress of the ideal. Burmah is a country where strikingly successful endeavours continue to be made to hold constantly before the eyes of the people exemplars of the ideal life, and the results are astonishing--approximating a perfection which it is hardly possible to over-rate. Notwithstanding the enormous capacity and appreciation its inhabitants possess for the frivolities of existence, they are wont to support out of their slender resources a numerous staff of monks, who are to be found in all parts of the land, and in every place where their fellow-creatures congregate in small or large numbers. However far laymen may deviate from the _Path_, the ideal life as exemplified by the monks must not be tampered with. It is the expressed will of the laity that this example should be unremittingly preserved in all its integrity and purity, whatever may be the sum of their own failings. It is this intense admiration and fervour on the part of the lay community for the ideal life, as known to them through the teaching of the Enlightened One, that has secured this incalculable blessing to the people, and made Burmah a model for all nations in this respect. There is a sadness unspeakable in the thought that perhaps, ere long, this ancient and ennobling bond between the people and their religious teachers, between the material and the ideal, will be swept away in the wake of commerce and utilitarianism, and all their attendant debasements.