ight; but so soon as it proceeded to stalk
into the street and earn its own living, its veracious character began
to tell. When out of its theories sprang inventions and discoveries that
revolutionized every-day affairs and changed the very face of things,
society insensibly caught its spirit. Man awoke to the inestimable value
of exactness. From scientists proper, the spirit filtered down through
every stratum of education, till to-day the average man is born exact to
a degree which his forefathers never dreamed of becoming. To-day, as
a rule, the more intelligent the individual, the more truthful he is,
because the more innately exact in thought, and thence in word and
action. With us, to lie is a sign of a want of cleverness, not of an
excess of it.

The second cause, the extension of trade, has inculcated the same regard
for veracity through the pocket. For with the increase of business
transactions in both time and space, the telling of the truth has become
a financial necessity. Without it, trade would come to a standstill at
once. Our whole mercantile system, a modern piece of mechanism unknown
to the East till we imported it thither, turns on an implicit belief
in the word of one's neighbor. Our legal safeguards would snap like
red tape were the great bond of mutual trust once broken. Western
civilization has to be truthful, or perish.

And now for the spirits of the two beliefs.

The soul of any religion realizes in one respect the Brahman idea of the
individual soul of man, namely, that it exists much after the manner of
an onion, in many concentric envelopes. Man, they tell us, is composed
not of a single body simply, but of several layers of body, each shell
as it were respectively inclosing another. The outermost is the merely
material body, of which we are so directly cognizant. This encases a
second, more spiritual, but yet not wholly free from earthly affinities.
This contains another, still more refined; till finally, inside of all
is that immaterial something which they conceive to constitute the
soul. This eventual residuum exemplifies the Franciscan notion of pure
substance, for it is a thing delightfully devoid of any attributes
whatever.

We may, perhaps, not be aware of the existence of such an elaborate
set of encasings to our own heart of hearts, nor of a something so
very indefinite within, but the most casual glance at any religion will
reveal its truth as regards the soul of a belief. We