edience;
its church arrangements, with shrines of saints and angels; its use of
images, pictures, and illuminated missals; its service, with a striking
general resemblance to the Mass; antiphonal choirs; intoning of prayers;
recital of creeds; repetition of litanies; processions; mystic rites and
incense; the offering and adoration of bread upon an altar lighted
by candles; the drinking from a chalice by the priest; prayers and
offerings for the dead; benediction with outstretched hands; fasts,
confessions, and doctrine of purgatory--all this and more was now
clearly revealed. The good father was evidently staggered by these
amazing facts; but his robust faith soon gave him an explanation: he
suggested that Satan, in anticipation of Christianity, had revealed
to Buddhism this divinely constituted order of things. This naive
explanation did not commend itself to his superiors in the Roman Church.
In the days of St. Augustine or of St. Thomas Aquinas it would doubtless
have been received much more kindly; but in the days of Cardinal
Antonelli this was hardly to be expected: the Roman authorities, seeing
the danger of such plain revelations in the nineteenth century, even
when coupled with such devout explanations, put the book under the ban,
though not before it had been spread throughout the world in various
translations. Father Huc was sent on no more missions.

Yet there came even more significant discoveries, especially bearing
upon the claims of that great branch of the Church which supposes itself
to possess a divine safeguard against error in belief. For now was
brought to light by literary research the irrefragable evidence that the
great Buddha--Sakya Muni himself--had been canonized and enrolled among
the Christian saints whose intercession may be invoked, and in whose
honour images, altars, and chapels may be erected; and this, not only
by the usage of the medieval Church, Greek and Roman, but by the special
and infallible sanction of a long series of popes, from the end of the
sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth--a sanction granted under
one of the most curious errors in human history. The story enables us to
understand the way in which many of the beliefs of Christendom have been
developed, especially how they have been influenced from the seats
of older religions; and it throws much light into the character and
exercise of papal infallibility.

Early in the seventh century there was composed, as