Zürich,
1.4.1926

… I am taking the opportunity of sending you a just published book about a fashionable Indian miracle worker. You will perhaps be surprised at my taking so much trouble about a sterile subject, and I am even more surprised myself. I wrote an article denouncing the stupid belief people had in the fakir's superhuman claims, with the result that I was attacked, not just as if, like Luther, I had laid hands on the sacred person of the Pope, but as if I had made a bad smell in the Holy of Holies. Now these gentry have got their deserts. The saint is exposed like a prima donna extricated from a stinkbutt and the outcry his fanatical admirers are making is enough to make the devil sick. The freer Protestant circles are delighted at my disclosures. I wanted to strike a blow at superstition, stupidity and goggle-eyed self-abasement, but one should really spend one's time less unprofitably. One makes no real headway against the stink, and the worse the