A Prophet In His Own Country

something extremely valuable and painfully inaccessible is meant. The same difficulties constantly recurr. These letters require profound study. Not because the thoughts are obscure—for it is not so, it is exceedingly simple—but because it is new. The average individual is brought up in certain beliefs, and any examination of these beliefs is positively discouraged. When fundamentals are attacked by a new thinker, people are completely thrown off their balance. At first they refuse to believe that they have heard aright. When it was first stated that the earth went around the sun, no notice was taken, because it was too absurd for discussion. It was only explanation of, and insistence on, the statement, that began to arouse enmity. Now, the kind of obscurity which arises from the fact that the hearer has nothing in his mind which would make him capable of understanding what was being said to him is not avoidable. The classical example of this is the translation of the Buddhist canon by the missionaries. They started with the conviction that the Buddhist must believe in a soul more or less like the Christian soul, and that Nirvana, being apparently some sort of place of residence not upon the earth, must be a variety of heaven. The result was of course a total misunderstanding of Buddhism. It was seen that the context did not square in any way with these conceptions, and the missionaries thereupon had the impudence to assume that the Buddhist was being illogical and self- contradictory. It is really necessary to hear Mr. Stuart rather than read him. When he speaks he is transfigured