honoured even to-day as the visible incarnation of Vishnu.[48] [48] It is an honour for which one pays dear to be permitted to consecrate to them one’s soul, one’s body, or the soul and body of one’s wife. One pays five rupees for the privilege of contemplating them, twenty for the privilege of touching them, thirteen for the privilege of being whipped by them, seventeen for the privilege of eating betel that they have chewed, nineteen for the privilege of drinking the water in which they have bathed, thirty-five for the privilege of washing their great toes, forty-two for the privilege of rubbing them with perfumed oil, and from one hundred to two hundred for tasting in their company the essence of delight. [Sidenote: Antagonism between priest and prophet.] Historically the priest has always found a rival, sometimes an adversary, in the prophet, from Buddha to Isaiah and Jesus. The prophet is not a priest bound to a sanctuary and slave to a tradition, but an individual. “Prophecy,” says M. Albert Réville, “is to religion what lyrism is to poetry.” The prophet and the lyric poet, in effect, both speak in the name of their own inspiration. The prophet is often a revolutionist, the priest is essentially a conservative; the one represents innovation, the other custom. [Sidenote: Dramatic element in cult.] Exterior forms of worship and rites allying themselves with refined and elevated sentiments have in all religions taken on a symbolic and expressive character that they did not possess in the practice of primitive sorcery; they have become æsthetic and by that fact rendered durable. For whoever looks upon the most ancient religious ceremonies with the eye of an artist, they consist in the reproduction, nowadays too mechanically and unconsciously, of a work of art which once was not without its significance and its beauty. They are nowadays like a hand-organ playing admirable compositions by some old master. Pfleiderer, in his “Philosophy of Religion,” has shown that the dominant element in the externals of worship is dramatic, the dramatization of some mythological or legendary scenes. It is especially among the Aryans that this element predominates; the Aryans are especially susceptible to the charm of great epics and dramas. The Semites are lyric rather, and thence arises the importance of prophecy among them; although the lyric element was also represented among the Greek poets and Pythonesses. The dramatic element, on the contrary, is visible in certain symbolic ceremonies of Christianity and Judaism. The Mass was formerly a veritable drama of the Passion in which the spectators also took part; the half pagan, half Christian processions that still subsist to-day possess for the crowd something of the attractiveness of the opera. The Communion is a dramatization of the Lord’s Supper. Catholicism especially is distinguished by