Asia is a religious world _par excellence_. Religion animates all phases and fibres of human existence. It does not confine itself to the relations between Creator and creature, but it also governs political and social life; it penetrates everything; it enters into the most secret thoughts and aspirations of the human mind; it rules the course of the earthly body; it creates laws and orders daily life; it teaches us how to dress, feed, and comport ourselves; also in what manner we must eat, drink, and love--in a word, it is the one all-pervading instrument to secure happiness and to ennoble life. Coming back to Europe after a sojourn of many years under these Asiatic influences, one cannot fail to be struck by the looseness of the religious structure and by the constant efforts made by the State, the Church, and sometimes also by society to strengthen and keep upright the frail, shaky building tottering on its foundation. In Asia this is not necessary. With the exception of the Motazilites and other freethinkers during the first centuries of the Hejira, scepticism and free thought have found no adherents in Islam, and in modern times less than ever. The great masses of the Mohammedans are strictly religious; all discussion in matters of religion is prohibited, except perhaps to the Shiite Mollahs, and highly edifying to me were the hours spent in Ispahan under the plane-trees in the garden of Medressei Shah, where I could converse freely and openly with the Persian clerics about the Divine tradition of the Koran, the immortality of the soul, &c., &c. With Moslems of other nationalities the principle _noli me tangere_ governs all matters of religion, and when we leave this stronghold of faith and come to Europe, where the struggle between faith and knowledge has been going on for hundreds of years, where Spinoza, Voltaire, Gibbon, Draper, Buckle, and many other modern thinkers have been successfully employed on the demolition of the religious structure; where attempts are made to supplant the worship of God with the worship of humanity; the hypocrisy and dissimulation prevailing in our world must strike us painfully. What Christianity and Judaism give us to behold passes all description. In spite of Strauss and Renan, Büchner and Huxley, millions of Westerners pretend to be either Christians or Jews without even believing that there is a God. The majority of Churchmen are so enlightened by modern science that they, least of all, believe in the doctrines they preach and fight for, and the traveller from Asia to Europe must, perforce, ask himself the question, "Why all this hypocrisy, all this dissimulation? Why this persistent closing of one's eyes against the rays of light which our culture, after a hard struggle with the prevailing darkness, has at last revealed?" This incomprehensible love of pretence has in Europe attained to such a pass that in certain leading circles hypocrisy, the