Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/752

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The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton

faith in conceding to him a Catholic funeral. It is difficult to see how any of them could have acted otherwise.

Lastly, it has been asserted that Sir Richard Burton "loathed" the Roman Catholic Church; and though he was indifferent to most religions, he entertained a "positive aversion" to this one, and therefore to "kidnap" him on his death-bed was peculiarly cruel. I have read most of Burton's writings, and it is true, especially in his earlier books, that he girds against what he conceives to be certain abuses in the Roman Catholic Church and her priesthood in out-of-the-way countries; but then he attacks other forms of Christianity and other religions too. He had a great hatred of cant and humbug under the cloak of religion, and denounced them accordingly. There is nothing remarkable in this. We all denounce cant and humbug in the abstract, often most loudly when we are humbugs ourselves. If Burton attacked Christianity more than other religions, and Catholicism more than other forms of Christianity, he probably did so because they came more in his way. His religious acts generally appear to have been guided by the principle of "When one is at Rome, do as Rome does." He was a Mohammedan among Mohammedans, a Mormon among Mormons, a Sufi among the Shazlis, and a Catholic among the Catholics. One thing he certainly was not in his later years—a member of the Church of England. He was baptized and brought up in the Anglican Communion. He entered at Trinity College, Oxford, and he joined the Indian army as a member of the Church of