728 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Noteworthy in the progress of this knowledge was the work 

 of Fathers Hue and Gabet. In 1839 the former of these, a French 

 Lazarist priest, set out on a mission to China. Having prepared 

 himself at Macao by eighteen months of hard study, and having 

 arrayed himself like a native, even to the wearing of the queue 

 and the staining of his skin, he visited Pekin and penetrated 

 Mongolia. Five years later, taking Gabet with him, both dis- 

 guised as Lamas, he began his long and toilsome journey to the 

 chief seats of Buddhism in Thibet, and after two years of fearful 

 dangers and sufferings accomplished it. Driven out finally by 

 the Chinese, Hue returned to Europe in 1852, having made one of 

 the most heroic, self-denying, and, as it turned out, one of the 

 most valuable efforts in all the noble annals of Christian mis- 

 sions. His accounts of these journeys, written in a style simple, 

 clear, and interesting, at once attracted attention throughout the 

 world. But far more important than any services he had ren- 

 dered to the Church he served was the influence of his book upon 

 the general opinions of thinking men. For he completed a series 

 of revelations made by earlier, less gifted, and less devoted trav- 

 elers, and brought to the notice of the world the amazing simi- 

 larity of the ideas, institutions, observances, ceremonies, and 

 ritual, and even the ecclesiastical costumes of the Buddhists to 

 those of his own Church. 



Buddhism was thus shown with its hierarchy, in which the 

 Grand Lama, an infallible representative of the Most High, is 

 surrounded by its minor Lamas, much like cardinals, with its 

 bishops wearing mitres, its celibate priests with shaven crown, 

 cope, dalmatic, and censer, its cathedrals with clergy gathered in 

 the choir; its vast monasteries filled with monks and nuns vowed 

 to poverty, chastity, and obedience; its church arrangements, 

 with shrines of saints and angels ; its use of images, pictures, and 

 illuminated missals ; its service, with a striking general resem- 

 blance to the Mass ; antiphonal choirs ; intoning of prayers ; re- 

 cital of creeds ; repetition of litanies ; processions ; mystic rites 

 and incense ; the offering and adoration of bread upon an altar 

 lighted by candles ; the drinking from a chalice by the priest ; 

 prayers and offerings for the dead ; benediction with outstretched 

 hands ; fasts, confessions, and doctrine of purgatory all this and 

 more was now clearly revealed. The good father was evidently 

 staggered by these amazing facts ; but his robust faith soon gave 

 him an explanation : he suggested that Satan, in anticipation of 

 Christianity, had revealed to Buddhism this divinely constituted 

 order of things. This na'ive explanation did not commend itself 

 to his superiors in the Roman Church. In the days of St. Au- 

 gustine or of St. Thomas Aquinas it would doubtless have been 

 received much more kindly ; but in the days of Cardinal Anto- 



