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Even the great founders of Protestantism, with one conspicuous exception, were men of austerity, though asceticism was incompatible with their principles. Calvin was a man of most self-denying life. The type of religion which Knox introduced into Scotland was one of rejection of all that is attractive to the sense, and it is only now breaking up. The English Puritans and Quakers fasted and watched whilst the Cavaliers revelled; and the severities which Wesley and Whitfield voluntarily underwent are well known. There is just one exception. Luther, a man of coarse and vigorous animalism, was no ascetic, but he was a man of immense spontaneous power, and his seclusion at Wartburg served to concentrate his force.

If asceticism were to come into vogue again, it would exercise an influence over men of the present day quite as great as it did in former ages-not because it is right or wrong, but because, from a positive point of view, it has a condensed dynamic force which will bowl down all the feeble and foolish who fritter away their energies, and make no effort to concentrate their will on the cultivation of their nobler faculties.

Asceticism is, then, the withdrawal of the vital force from the muscles, that it may be exerted on the generation of brain-matter. The body is a factory in which the machinery fabricates muscular fibre, adipose tissue, and neurine. At will, the greater part of the power may be directed to the production of any one of these substances, to the neglect of the others. Further, it may be turned to the development of one nervous ganglion at the expense of another. The cerebrum may be the object of its attention, and the sensorium may be overlooked, and vice versa. Judicious asceticism labours to build up both side by side; injudicious asceticism endeavours to rear one at the expense

of the other. The mental system is then over-balanced, and the result is either, what for want of a better term we will call idealism, or mysticism. The former is a selfconcentrated condition, without sympathy and interest in anything which does not fall into the vortex of the one idea; the other is a condition of exaggerated sentiment, indifferent to reason and destructive of judgment.

We have crucial examples of these opposite results in Buddhism and in Christian mysticism.

The Buddhist renounces the life of sense, passion, and consciousness, for that of pure bliss, when he becomes a Buddha; and lives the life of intelligence freed from all limits the human intellect in its infinity. All Buddhas are in reality one, and the great object of the Buddhist's austerities is to lose himself in this one Buddha: the very meaning of the word is intelligence. But this intelligence is not active, it is quiescent, divested of all material ideas, of qualities and conditions. The mind is educated to rest absorbed in contemplation of its own essence, divested of its personality. We do not know in what consists the essence of matter. A body is composed of atoms: when these change, the body changes; when the body is resolved to its component parts, the atoms only exist. What, then, is a body? At the foundation of all existence there must be something. What that is, we do not know. The Buddhist, therefore, calls it ignorance. This ignorance is the principle co-existing with intelligence by virtue of which Dharma, or matter, is. To escape from all material conceptions, from every sensual feeling, is, then, to approach most nearly to the universal Budda. Thus the mind is given no person and no object to which the affections may cling, but is required to fade into a state, so vague and negative that there is not a spot therein on which sentiment can find anchorage.

The Buddhists of Nepaul are considered to be theists, and their Deity is Adi-Buddha. Their worship approaches closely that of Brahmanism. But in Ava and Ceylon the purest form of Buddhism is preserved intact. In Ceylon, especially, owing more or less to insulation and seclusion, it has remained for upwards of two thousand years unchanged in its leading characteristics.

The ethic code of Buddha can hardly be ranked lower than that of Christianity, and it is immeasurably superior to every heathen system that the world has ever seen, not excepting that of Zarathustra. It forbids the taking of life from even the humblest animal in creation, it prohibits falsehood, dishonesty, intemperance, and incontinence— vices which are referable to three predominant passions, concupiscence, anger, and ignorance. These involve hypocrisy, pride, and want of charity, ungenerous suspicion, covetousness in every form, evil wishes to others, the betrayal of secrets, and the propagation of slander, all which forms of evil are strictly forbidden. On the other hand, every conceivable virtue and excellence are simultaneously enjoined the forgiveness of injuries, the practice of charity, reverence of virtue, the cherishing of learning, submission to discipline, veneration for parents, the care of one's family, a sinless vocation, contentment and gratitude, subjection to reproof, moderation in prosperity, submission under affliction, and cheerfulness at all times. 'Those," said Sakya-Muni, “who practise all these virtues, and are not overcome by evil, will enjoy the perfection of happiness, and attain to supreme renown."

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According to the institutes of its founders, the worship of Buddhism was not to be one of form and ceremony, but to be an appeal to reason alone. Religion, therefore, it can hardly be called, for it opens no field for the play of the

emotions. It is rather a school of philosophy. It is the Protestantism of Oriental religion-the religion of intelligence, not of sentiment-one which seeks abstractions rather than concretions, morality rather than dogma. This close resemblance seems to have been felt on first contact of Calvinism and Buddhism, for we find in 1684 the Dutch government importing as its own expense Buddhist missionaries from Arracan to Ceylon to oppose the progress of Catholicism.

Mild and benevolent as are the aspects and designs of Buddhism, its theories have failed to realize in practice the reign of virtue which they proclaim. Beautiful as is the body of its doctrines, it wants the vivifying energy of the emotions to ensure its ascendency and power. Its cold philosophy and thin abstractions, however they might exercise the faculties of anchorites, have proved insufficient of themselves to arrest man in his career of passion and pursuit; and the bold experiment of influencing the heart and regulating the conduct of mankind by the external decencies and the mutual dependencies of morality, unsustained by higher hopes, has proved in this instance an unredeemed and hopeless failure. It was fear which threw multitudes at the feet of Buddha-the fear of an eternity of revolution through cycles of animal existences; and in the hope he opened to them of escape from this endless whirl of misery lay its sole dynamic power. That fear removed, Buddhism has no propelling force, and stationary and uninfluential on men's conducts it must henceforth remain. "The inculcation of the social virtues as the consummation of happiness here and hereafter, suggests an object sufficiently attractive for the bulk of mankind," says Sir J. Emerson Tennent; "but Buddhism presents along with it no adequate knowledge of the means which

are indispensable for its attainment. In confiding all to the mere strength of the human intellect, and the enthusiastic self-reliance and determination of the human heart, it makes no provision for defence against those powerful temptations before which ordinary resolution must give way; and it affords no consoling support under those overwhelming afflictions by which the spirit is prostrated and subdued, when unaided by the influence of a purer faith and unsustained by its confidence in a diviner power. From the contemplation of the Buddhist all the awful and unending realities of a future life are withdrawn-his hopes and his fears are at once mean and circumscribed; the rewards held in prospect by his creed are insufficient to incite him to virtue, and its punishments too remote to deter him from vice. Thus, insufficient for time, and rejecting eternity, the utmost triumph of his religion is to live without fear, and to die without hope." 1

Socially, and in its effects upon individuals, the result of the system in Ceylon has been apathy almost approaching to infidelity. The mass of the population are profoundly ignorant of, and utterly indifferent to, the tenets of their creed. In their daily intercourse and acts, morality and virtue, so far from being apparent in practice, are barely discernible as the exception. "The same results appear in the phases of Buddhism beyond India," says M. Maupied; "in the north of Asia and in China, it has arrived at a sort of speculative atheism, which has not only arrested proselytism, but which is self-destructive, and which in the end will completely ruin it."2 Wherever it exhibits vitality it has renounced its principles, and has called to its aid sentiment, which has resolved Buddhism into hero worship,

1 Christianity in Ceylon, p. 227; London, 1850.

2 Maupied Essai sur l'Origine des Peuples Anciens, p. 275.

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