It is a great misfortune for a nation to have an extensive sacerdotal caste, whose interest it is to continue, generation after generation, the belief in deceptive fancies which check the free growth of true ideas and all healthy habits of thought. Their livelihood depends on the people continuing to believe in demons, fairies, and charms. The missionary and the schoolmaster, the magazine and the newspaper, are all needed to check these bad influences, and replace dangerous and injurious popular notions, by healthy and useful knowledge, to he gathered from God's two books, that of Nature and that of Revelation. Then as to the effects of Buddhism, it may be said to have been good in some respects. It bears a consistent testimony to the vanity of the world, and the essential and immense superiority of soul purity to earthly grandeur. But in founding on this a monastic institute, it has followed a wrong plan, and failed to attain the purity desired. It teaches the need of a personal redeemer to rescue from the moral evils attendant on our present existence. But this redeemer is a Buddha or a Bodhisattwa, a man or being possessing none of the powers attributed to him. Among the prominent and most pernicious evils for which the popular Buddhism of the present day is responsible is idolatry. It is an enormous evil that Buddhism has placed the Buddhas and Bodhisattwas in the position in the reverence of the people, that ought to be held only by the Creator and Father of the world. Idolatry puts fiction in the stead of truth, and, as we every day see in China, renders the mind indifferent to truth. This, too, is a vast evil. Confucianism makes everything of morality; and the worship of Buddhist images, when it is complied with, becomes a moral duty on the part of the emperor or the magistrate, only because it is li (ceremonial duty), not