Englishmen think the reverence felt in Tibet for Lhasa, and
in China for Mukden, and in India for Mount Merou rather foolish, but the Pope is evidently of a different opinion. There has been a Congress of Freethinkers in Rome, and his Holiness, naturally and properly, thinks it his duty to protest. So he writes of his grief to Cardinal Respighi, Vicar of Rome, in these words : "The intelligence which pretends to be inde- pendent of God is guilty of sacrilege towards Him. The demonstration becomes infinitely more serious when it is remem- bered that it has been made in Rome." The sanctity of Rome, a city probably more deeply stained by the crimes of ages than any other in the world, is such that even sacrilege against the Most High acquires a deeper taint of wickedness from being committed within it! The Grand Lama would understand and appreciate that sentence perfectly, and it certainly shows that educated white men can share in their own way the most rooted of Asiatic superstitions. They have not yet risen quite to the level of the Jewish King three thousand years ago.
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