That word “most” means, of course, Jesus Christ. There have not been a crowd of religious founders since 500 B.C., and all this innuendo in the description of Buddhism is an innuendo delivered at the Faith.
On the same page, a little further on, there is the sneer, “of course it was impossible to believe that Buddha was the son of a mortal father.” That is a sneer at the Incarnation, as is the sentence a few lines further on, “a theology grew up about the Buddha. He was discovered to be a God.”
Then on the next page there is the familiar taunt against the titles of affection and veneration given to Our Lady. A certain Eastern goddess is Queen of the Sea, so Mr. Wells must put in quite gratuitously and out of place the words “Stella Maris,” which some very learned man has told him means “Star of the Sea.”
Then there is a completely misleading quotation from Huc. The misleading is no doubt unconscious, for I very much doubt whether Mr. Wells has ever read Huc; he is probably depending upon what he may have heard vaguely on the matter in conversation. At any rate, the grossly misleading character of the passage must be pointed out.
He quotes Huc’s interesting description of the similarities between Christian (or Catholic) and Buddhist liturgical details, and puts the whole thing in a completely false light by using the word “perplexing.” He says, “We read in Huc’s travels” how “perplexing” he found “all these things,” the innuendo being that Catholics regard ritual as the soul of their religion and are disturbed in their Faith on finding foreign analogies to it.
No doubt Mr. Wells was told by those who coached him that the Abbé Huc was thrown into an agony of doubt by finding Buddhist ceremonies so like our own. But he would have done well to verify the point. It was foolish in him not to do so.
I know the passage well: there is not a word in it about Huc being perplexed. Why should he be? There is not an indication in Huc’s style or tone in the matter that he was perplexed. He noted with great interest the very exact correspondence between many details of ritual—down to such a tiny point as the chains and cover of the Thurible—and he gives a lucid, probable, learned and very rational account of when and how the later Buddhism may have copied such things (p. 112, Vol. II, of the third edition).
Mr. Wells ends this excursion against the Catholic Church (for that is what his new-found enthusiasm for Buddhism really means) by a passage on page 250 in the very best traditions of the “No Popery” lecturers of my youth. Buddhism caught “almost every disease of corrupt religions: idols, temples, altars, and censers.” It is a funny list, with a horrible bathos on the word censers. Idols mean images; altar means altar all right; temples mean buildings put up with care and made as beautiful as possible—or at least what the putter-up thinks beautiful—in honour of the thing worshipped. But censers are only things in which you burn incense; and though they are an excellent adjunct to liturgy, they really have not the importance which Mr. Wells, in common with most Kensitites, attaches to them. I assure him I could get on perfectly well without incense. On the other hand, I could not get on without an altar; and a lack of images in a Christian church would seem to me very deplorable: a sort of empty, hungry, mean, absence of a very proper and natural religious function which, if there be a true religion, would certainly be found attached to that religion.
Then we have, just before the end of all the affair, the weary old business copied from Gibbon, and much older than Gibbon, “What would Christ and His apostles think of High Mass at St. Peter’s”? (By the way, Low Mass in Huddersfield is just as much to the purpose as High Mass in St. Peter’s.) Only here it is not High Mass at St. Peter’s shocking the Creator of the Catholic Church, but a Buddhist ceremony shocking poor Buddha.
But more important than his ignorance of Huc’s testimony of other special points is his complete failure to set down the prime contrast between Catholicism and Buddhism: that the latter is founded on Despair. That is the whole point. It is that which makes between the living Church which Jesus Christ founded and the negative philosophy of Asia a difference of day and night. Mr. Wells does not omit this essential point from malice: he does it from ignorance. His whole account of essential Buddhism takes for granted that it is the religion he himself holds—a highly rarefied Protestantism.