tion, but it has been declared by Buddha, that it would not equal a maha-kalpa." (Man. Bud., pp. 1, 2, 6, 7.)

They do not call this eternity, nor say that duration here finds its limit; but if it continues it returns into the same cycle, and is composed of such measurements. Such comparisons we call puerile; and even when a boy, and delighting in all things boyish, similar attempts, which we sometimes heard from the pulpit to illustrate and impress the great idea of eternity, never failed in us to revolt the imagination and belittle the idea it sought to enlarge. And so ever the attempt to measure the infinite by the finite of necessity limits it, and destroys the idea of the absolute.

We notice one other application of this general feature. We have already seen that it denies to the world a creative God, by necessity of denying the possibility of a first cause. Yet they name a “Supreme God." Buddha is to them the highest conception of a perfect being. If he cannot be Creator, what of his other attributes? When one inquires after his wisdom, "Does Buddha know all things?" the answer is, "Yes, he knows all things." And after some arguing pro and con, this universal yea comes down to this level: "The power of thought in Buddha is exceedingly quick and subtle. I will explain to you how it is, but I can only do it in a very inadequate manner. Thus, in one gela, or load of rice, there are 63,660,000 grains; each of these grains can be separately considered by Buddha in a moment of time." (Man. Bud., p. 386.) Such is their measure of omniscience.

Leaving these vagaries, we contemplate their system of morals with a profounder interest. What men may speculate on questions that lie beyond the sphere of human action is a matter of indifference, is nothing, compared with that irrevocable law which binds the moral destiny of the race. And if that law be a law of justice and no mercy, a law of works and no grace, a law of self-redemption and no divine redeemer, and in a world where the variant elements, cold with heat, light with darkness, good with evil, love with hate, joy with sorrow, life with death, mingle in perpetual strife; to see a human soul thrust forward into such a world, and instantly find in himself a law in his members warring against the law of his mind, and then, abandoned of all higher powers, to wrestle with his fate under the inexorable decrees of such a law, has ever seemed to us one of the sublimest pictures the imagination could draw. And it is precisely in such a world, and under such relations, the contemplative Buddhist finds himself. Without an atonement, he is left to "work out his own salvation with fear and trembling." And just in proportion to his merit or demerit does he rise out of this

moral commotion toward a heaven of rest, or sink into a hell of deeper abasement and viler labors. And the ultimate gaol to which he hopes to arrive, if possibly the balance of added merits, through the vicissitudes of many generations, may at length qualify him therefor, is the eternal repose of annihilation.

But systems of morals, though they may attract now and then an earnest man toward the standard they fix, have little power, apart from divine grace, to bring up the level of the mass. And the practical result here is, that the populations of India and Eastern Asia have sunk to a depth of corruption which outvies, in the enormity of its revolting details, the description attempted by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, and makes the picture there drawn by the sacred pencil one of faint colors compared with the reality. Vice is systematized by their institutions, and most in those forms which are most destructive of all that is holy in the family relation, institutions handed down in form and manner from ancient Babylon, just as delineated by "the father of history" in his day. No maiden, for example, can have place or respect in society. Her condition disqualifies her. The Roman youth at the proper age was, with public solemnities, invested with the manly gown, and charged with the responsibilities of citizen; from member of the family he became member of the state. The Indian maiden, in like manner, in the midst of the solemnities and hilarities of their great annual festival, in the precincts of their most venerable temples, is invested with a new moral condition. She is thus withdrawn from the sacred seclusion of the family and constituted a part of society.*

But a religion has not only doctrines, it has also form. Doctrines are imposed by authority of revelation or reason; rites and ceremonies are for the most part of human growth. The true religion has had indeed certain ceremonies prescribed by divine authority, corresponding to the ideas it wished to inculcate; but ever as error has obscured or supplanted the truth, superadded ceremonies have varied still in accordance with the prevalent idea of the system. And it is probable that the same ideas, planted in the soil of our common humanity, and having similar facilities of growth, would

• Herodotus describes the custom in detail (i, 199) precisely as it flourishes at the present day; and the author of the Book of Baruch, (vi, 42, 43,) written probably at Babylon, has daguerreotyped the same picture, and that with an expression which reveals the heart of the times. The one, he says, who has already received the challenge in the name of the goddess," and is thus enabled to return from her dedication, saying with Rhenie in Theocritus:

"

παρθένος ἔνθα βέβηκα, γυνὴ δ' εἰς οἶκον ἀφέρπω, "Reproacheth her fellow, that she was not thought as worthy as herself, nor her cord broken."

ever clothe themselves in similar forms, and develop similar institutions, modified only in their non-essential features by local circumstances. With this law for our guide, what a field is opened here for the study of the "comparative anatomy" of institutions! We turn to this first book of Mr. Hardy's; the title strikes us as sounding quite Christianly, at least Romish; it is on Monachism. We open to the table of contents, and note the titles to some of the chapters. We have The Laws and Regulations of the Priesthood; Names and Titles, (that is, of the Priests;) The Noviciate; Celibacy; Poverty; Mendicancy; The Diet; Sleep; The Tonsure; The Habit; The Residence; Obedience; The Exercise of Discipline; The Order of Nuns; Modes of Worship, Ceremonies, and Festivals; Meditation; Ascetic Rites and Supernatural Powers, etc. Koeppen has a chapter entitled "Das Moenchthum und die Regel," with a similar array of topics. A framework here, lo! which might receive Romanism bodily for its filling up and garniture, and find it perfectly fitting.

So complete, indeed, is the correspondence, even in the detail of ceremonies and customs, that, when the Romish missionaries penetrated the East, the multitudes there accepted with facility the religion they taught as only a form of Buddhism, differing in nowise in its essential features, but made attractive, perhaps, by some few novelties and higher exhibitions of art. The missionaries equally recognized the resemblance, and lifting up their hands in holy amazement, the pious fathers saw no way to account for the strange phenomenon but to suppose that the devil, of pure malice and mockery, had taught his children to imitate and caricature the forms of the true faith. It would be interesting to trace out this parallelism in detail, but our present limits forbid.

One other point we notice. When shall this grand drama end? When shall this awful pall, that has enveloped the world so long in the blackness of darkness, be lifted and let in the light of truth? What hope out of these ages of despair? Faith in the divine oracles gives assurance that this kingdom of error shall cease; that the cry of the voice which John heard: "Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen," shall be realized to the world. We have also a profane prophecy to place by the side of the sacred, which cannot fail to interest us, whatever may be its value. These profane prophecies and sibylline oracles have been the puzzle of the ages, and, if authentic, are certainly some of them marvelous phenomena. But while in some cases, as of the Aztecs and Sandwich Islanders, we may doubt the authenticity of the alleged predictions, may doubt the correctness of the reports which bring from their traditions a

popular expectation of a new religion to be introduced just at the time it so happened, yet here is a case well ascertained and unambiguous. It has been among the traditions of the Buddhists, and on record probably from the time of Gotama, if not earlier, that Buddhism shall expire in five thousand years from its origin.* Mr. Hardy, dating from the era of Gotama, indulges the earnest hope that long before that period shall be completed, the Lord will "cut short the work in righteousness." But carry up the history of the system to the date we have assigned it, and we are startled with the agreement of the prediction with the present prospect. That date is in the near neighborhood of three thousand years before Christ, a little more or less. We are now, therefore, rapidly approaching the point which, according to its own claims, rounds the allotted period of this huge system of iniquity, and what do we see? Within the last few months the decisive blow has been struck in the East which unseats this "mother of harlots and abominations of the earth" from her ancient throne. With the cession of her prerogatives, now accomplished, it only remains for the Church to enter in and possess the gates of the enemy. The waters of the Jordan are now stayed; the armies of Israel are beginning to enter; the faithful Joshuas are beginning to lead the solemn march around the Jerichos; and we may hope that before another century shall elapse the mighty sound of the blast of the rams' horns, and the confusion of tumbling walls, and the shout of victory, shall resound through the four quarters of the globe.

ART. VI.-MYSTICISM.

Le Philosophe Inconnu. Reflexions sur les Idees de Louis Claude de Saint Martin, le Theosophe suivies de Fragments d'une Correspondence inèdite entre Saint Martin et Kirchberger. Par L. MOREAU. Paris: Lecoffre & Co.

Du Mysticisme au xviii. Seicle. Essai sur la Vie et la Doctrine de Saint Martin, le Philosophe Inconnu. Par E. CARO, Professeur agrige de Philosophie au Lycée de Rennes. Paris: L. Hachette.

THE title of the last named brochure will most probably excite some astonishment in the minds of our readers. What!" they will exclaim, "Mysticism in the eighteenth century? and in France too? Mysticism in a country where the historians of philosophy had led us to expect naught but dry analysis, sensationalism, and athe1sm-in fact, the very antipodes of that aspiration after the infinite, * Hardy, Man. Bud., p. 430; Koeppen, p. 327.

which is the characteristic of true Mysticism?" Yes, so it is; strong as the current rolled which carried along a whole society down the vortex of moral destruction, the reaction was almost as powerful; and if the names of Voltaire, Dupuis, Diderot, and Boullange sounded "as familiar as household words" to the young France of 1789, there were not a few more sober individuals who learned better doctrines from M. de Bonald, M. de Maistre, and the illustrious man whom we would now introduce to the friends of metaphysical speculation, Louis Claude Saint Martin, le philosophe inconnu. We have just said better doctrines; but from the remarks which, in a former number of this journal, we were led to offer on the author of les soirées de Saint Petersbourg, it will appear quite evident that we are not prepared to indorse the whole system of philosophy he constructed, including his denunciations of Lord Bacon and his advocacy of ultramontanism; the sequel of the present article will show no less clearly, we hope, that the theories of M. de Saint Martin are open to objections of the strongest character; at the same time some of the truths of Christianity these men undoubtedly held, and they claim the great merit of having entered a protest in favor of spiritualist doctrines at a time when such a course was neither popular nor even safe.

In opening his biography of M. de Saint Martin, M. Caro remarks, with much truth, that a revival of Mysticism was quite in the order of things toward the end of the eighteenth century. "Superstition is the last creed of an unbelieving age. . . It seems that in virtue of a fatal law man only shakes off the yoke of belief to fall under the sway of illusions." When Plotinus proposed his dreamy metaphysics to the Grecian world, the popular faith had long ago lost all the hold it ever had on the mind of the community, while the dogmatism of the great schools of moral philosophy had expired under the subtle criticism of Carneades and Ænesidemus. It was in a precisely similar juncture that Saint Martin appeared and preached to the followers of Baron d'Holbach the essential doctrines of man's fall and of the necessity of a Divine expiation. No age that ever boasted of its intellectual progress was so much taken up with all the extravagances of false prophets and the quackeries of designing knaves. Swedenborg, Cagliostro, Mesmer, the Count de Saint Germain were committing themselves by impostures which rendered miracles (if the adepts might be believed) a matter of every-day occurrence; illuminism, under various forms, seemed to be throwing down deep roots in Germany, Switzerland, and England. The books of Jacob Boehm had long been supplying an unwholesome food to minds overexcited by the events which agitated the political world; M.