and, if only it were possible, never to forget. The same truth has been beautifully expressed with regard to the Bulgarian villagers of Macedonia by Mr. Brailsford in his book upon that country:— “The real religion of the Balkans is older and more elemental than Christianity itself; more permanent even than the Byzantine rite. It bridges the intervening centuries and links in pious succession the modern peasant to his heathen ancestor, who wore the same costumes and led the same life in the same fields. It is based on a primitive sorrow before the amazing fact of death, which no mystery of the Resurrection has ever softened. It is neither a rite nor a creed, but only that yearning love of the living for the dead which is deeper than any creed.”[30] In the service of the living, the fervent religious spirit of the South takes other forms, some of adoration, some only ritualistic. Now and then it turns to practical utility—the hope that religion will bring some temporal good to the worshipper. There is a belief almost universal, I suppose, in our own country and in Europe that religious thoughts, prayers, and observances ensure outward well-being, health, protection, or prosperity of some kind. In the East it is probably not so common, for religion is there elevated to its proper sphere of the inmost soul, where the comforts and external advantages of life disappear into insignificance compared with the glory that is revealed. But, deeply religious as the Hindu mind can be, I found the people in the streets of Madras directing religious ecstasy to the rather trivial object of healing disease, much as though they had been mere Faith-healers or Christian Scientists. The festival of Shiva lasted three or four days, and at any hour of the burning sunlight, one could meet little processions parading through Black Town with some sort of shrine or image, accompanied by pipes and drums, dancing and praying crowds. The sick were caught up from the doors into the pious orgies and with holy revelry danced themselves into a state of ecstatic self-forgetfulness which was unquestionably wholesome. Few diseases, I think, could stand against such treatment, provided only that the patient survived. It might be tried with miraculous results in the streets of our bath-chair watering-places. But if the triumph and proof of religion depended on mere miracles of healing the sick and raising the dead, it would be a pity to waste a minute’s thought upon the subject.