Religion 175
every age, in every religion, have had clearer, higher vision. There was, therefore, no generally recognised principle in the new faith which could ever make war upon the gross fetichism of the ignorant tribes who were so far from all the world's centres of thought. Yet even a closer touch at that time would not have done much to expurgate from their minds those childish and dreadful fancies which civilisation has not yet entirely driven from Paris or New York. While palmists, clairvoyants, and sellers of images may flourish in our capitals ; while Friday bears a shady reputation, and dinners of thirteen are much less frequent than those of eleven and of fifteen, just so long may we feel sure that on the far Tibetan plateau we have found a long-lost brother with whom, hand in hand, we wend a painful way across the glooms of time.
"And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. Is 't night's predominance or the day's shame, That darkness does the face of earth entomb, When living light should kiss it? "
We, however, seem to be in the thinning edge of the black, witch-haunted forest, while our Tibetan brother is still in its darkest centre. Let us learn, by translation from M. Grenard's vivid pages, what we were, what the Tibetans are, by virtue of developing such ideas as those that damn the day Friday and the number thirteen.
"Of Buddha, who established as principle the abnegation of worldly vanities, who set forth as aim the annihila-
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