of sane, to believe it! It will be often our duty to protest against this
sort of hypothesis about men's doings and history; and I here, on the very
threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other
_isms_ by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this
world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them
up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more
advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but
quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the
health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of
their being about to die! Let us never forget this. It seems to me a most
mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving birth to any faith even in
savage men. Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.
We shall not see into the true heart of anything, if we look merely at the
quackeries of it; if we do not reject the quackeries altogether; as mere
diseases, corruptions, with which our and all men's sole duty is to have
done with them, to sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our practice.
Man everywhere is the born enemy of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to
have a kind of truth in it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather
sceptical Mr. Turner's _Account of his Embassy_ to that country, and see.
They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends
down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom
some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there
is a _Greatest_ Man; that _he_ is discoverable; that, once discovered, we
ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is the
truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here. The
Thibet priests have methods of their own of discovering what Man is
Greatest, fit to be supreme over them. Bad methods: but are they so much
worse than our methods,--of understanding him to be always the eldest-born
of a certain genealogy? Alas, it is a difficult thing to find good methods
for!--We shall begin to have a chance of understanding Paganism, when we