With the end of the first millennium of Christendom comes the period which the Buddhist knows as Mappo, the "last days," the period of the "Destruction of the Law." As this period comes on, the Christian, forgetting the spirit he is of, grasps the sword, for the conquest of the Holy Land, for the extirpation of Albigenses and other heretics. So does the Buddhist. It is the age of the great barrack monasteries, and of the wars waged by the monks of Hieizan, Onjoji, Negoro, Hongwanji, for the defence of

their supposed rights and the injury of their neighbour. In the midst of this period, disciples of the inquisition-loving Nichiren, who was yet a seer, find themselves brought face to face with the disciples of the inquisition-loving St. Dominic, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see in Japan the establishment of a permanent Inquisition. Yet the same period sees the loud proclamation, so comforting to the outcast and the sinner, of Salvation by Faith alone, through the mercies of One whose compassion has from the first been known, though under different names, to the Mahayanist and to the Christian. St. Francis and Wiclif (they will forgive me for thus coupling their names) are the Christian counterparts of Honen and Shinran. The Schoolmen, too, whose labour it was to reconcile Aristotle and Christ, find their counterparts in the labours of the great Japanese scholars of the middle ages, who worked to reconcile S'akyamuni and Confucius.

The first Christian millennium did not pass away without its warning of impending change. The Moslem peril profoundly moved Christendom, the same peril threatened China under the Tang. In both parts of the world, the meaning of the warning was largely misread, as was, probably, the similar warning of the Mongols, at the commencement of the second millennium.

This second millennium, which is the Buddhist period of the Mappo, is not yet finished; but may we not say that we have had the warning of an impending change? A man of the eighteenth century, a man of science, a dreamer, and yet a seer, amused his contemporaries by proclaiming that the year 1757 had seen in "the heavenlies" a spiritual judgment which was to be the precursor of a new Age and of a new Church. He brought no proof for his assertion, except the testimony of one of his own visions, and his testimony was rejected all but unanimously. And yet the