168 
In the archives of the Propaganda at Borne, there exists (or did exist) an 
original letter of Mi-Yang, the Grand Lama of Thibet, to the Pope date, 
July 8, 1742), in reply to the objection raised by a Pvomish missionary to his 
religion, which he undertook to refute. It reads thus : 
« This my writing is to the Grand Lama of your kingdom (i.e. the Pope). 
Entreat him to impart to me the argument of kindness and to pray for me 
.... In the past! the present, the future-in these three times, I have not 
understood that there is a law better than ours. It is your appiness a one, 
0 missionary, to hear the exalted name of our law ! May the spirits 
nrp contrary to this law he destroyed.” 
What, then, is this law, and what is its object of worship . We ave 
already heard something of the merits and demerits of the former, and it is 
not desirable that I should add to this, except one observation, that the 
measure of benevolence or kindliness to which the system tends, seems to 
me its only recommendation. It has this tendency in common with all 
mystical forms of thought. Aristotle has the remark that “as many 
as are superior are also melancholy;” and there is something not only 
pleasing and attractive to a certain class of minds in the Indian 
but also that which, by the endeavour it excites to ^ 
passions of humanity, leaves room for the gentler emotions of pity and 
compassion ; these last being strongly stirred by the view presented o ^ 
miseries of the world. “ On every side,” says the Lama above T^ted, are 
infinite pains, even to the spirit. The spirits of Jithars, though they. do no 
fefd on material things, equally endure the greatest punishments. The 
infernal ones, condemned, dwell in the fire, -on every side there are infinite 
torments, and the inhabitants feel the pain and the punishment . 
It will be in some measure intelligible, that in the mi 
attending the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the minds of many 
Christians should incline to the same manner of looking at things existen 
around them. Nor shall we be surprised if we find the stream of mys 
and the ascetic doctrines of the East mingling with and corrupting more and 
more the pure faith of the Gospel as time rolled on its course. 
Again, we find in our own history and amidst the fierce contests and 
religious animosities of the seventeenth century, mystical sects of 
religionists arose, whose revulsion from the order of things around them 
had 8 some considerable analogy with the early conflict of Buddhism wi 
B The grelt glory of the Christian revelation is that it presents before us a 
personal God and Saviour. It is to this that the Apostle John turns the 
attention of his readers in his first Epistle, which he writes in conflict w th 
the “seducers” of the day,— Gnostics imbued with the mysticism of th 
East. He declares that which he had seen and heard, that his hearers 
* Published in the Alphabetwm Tihetanum of A. A. Georgius ; also in the 
Inquirer (London, 1839), vol. ii. p* 194. 
