fully expanded self-reliance of maturity, and to conviction based on genuine insight and circumspection. When the force of a soul deficient in these qualities maintains its opposition to the world which is thus treated in a purely negative way, and forcefully breaks loose from all human ties, even though they may originally be the very closest, we can only characterize such conduct as the rawness of Spirit and a barbaric result of the power of abstraction, which is simply repulsive. So we may say that though from the point of view of the religious consciousness, as we find it to-day, it is indeed possible to honour, and to honour highly, this opening germ of religiosity in such representations, if, however, such a pious tendency proceeds to such lengths that we find it advancing to lay siege to what is both essentially rational and moral, then, so far from sympathizing with such a fanaticism of sanctity, we can only protest that a kind of abnegation such as this, which casts off from itself, shatters and treads upon that which is independently justifiable, and even sacred, appears to us both immoral in itself and subversive of the very type of religion it represents. There are many legends, tales, and poems which deal with this extreme form of the pious craze. We have, for example, the tale of a man who, though full of tenderness for his wife and family, and, moreover, beloved by all his friends, leaves his home and makes a pilgrimage. When at last he returns home in the guise of a beggar he refuses to disclose his identity. Alms are given him, and out of compassion a permanent lodging provided under the stairs. In this plight he lives for twenty years; he sees the grief of his family on his account, and only declares who he is on his death-bed. This kind of thing, which we are asked to revere as sanctity, is, of course, merely the egotism of a fanatic which revolts us. This long endurance of renunciation may remind us of the distrait nature of those penances, which the Hindoos voluntarily impose on themselves on religious grounds. But the endurance of the Hindoo has a very different significance. In that case a man deliberately places himself in a condition of vacuum and unconsciousness; in the case which we are now considering the _pain_, and the deliberate consciousness and feeling of the same is the real object, which it is assumed will be attained with just so much more purity as the suffering is associated with the consciousness of the value of and devotion to the severities which are accepted, and is, moreover, united with a vision for ever concentrated on the renunciation thus made. The richer the heart which takes on itself the burden of such ordeals, the nobler the content of its own possessions, and yet withal believes that it is bound to condemn them as of no merit, just so much the more difficult grows the task of reconciliation, and the more prone it is to bring about the most terrible convulsions and the most raving distraction.