There are wonderful Buddhist pictures which at first sight appear to have been made, like other Japanese pictures, with bold free sweeps of a skilled brush, but which, when closely examined, prove to have been executed in a much more marvelous manner. The figures, the features, the robes, the aureoles,--also the scenery, the colors, the effects of mist or cloud,--all, even to the tiniest detail of tone or line, have been produced by groupings of microscopic Chinese characters,--tinted according to position, and more or less thickly massed according to need of light or shade. In brief, these pictures are composed entirely out of texts of Sutras: they are mosaics of minute ideographs,--each ideograph a combination of strokes, and the symbol at once of a sound and of an idea.

Is our universe so composed?--an endless phantasmagory made only by combinations of combinations of combinations of combinations of units finding quality and form through unimaginable affinities;--now thickly massed in solid glooms; now palpitating in tremulosities of light and color; always and everywhere grouped by some stupendous art into one vast

mosaic of polarities;--yet each unit in itself a complexity inconceivable, and each in itself also a symbol only, a character, a single ideograph of the undecipherable text of the Infinite Riddle? . . . Ask the chemists and the mathematicians.

V

. . . "All beings that have life shall lay
Aside their complex form,--that aggregation
Of mental and material qualities
That gives them, or in heaven or on earth,
Their fleeting individuality."

The Book of the Great Decease.

In every teleological system there are conceptions which cannot bear the test of modern psychological analysis, and in the foregoing unfilled outline of a great religious hypothesis there will doubtless be recognized some "ghosts of beliefs haunting those mazes of verbal propositions in which metaphysicians habitually lose themselves." But truths will be perceived also,--grand recognitions of the law of ethical evolution, of the price of progress, and of our relation to the changeless Reality abiding beyond all change.