22 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



against Nature was carried into every branch of moral and mental 

 education. 



Such doctrines did not fail to bear their fruit. Ignorance gloried 

 in her indifference to the vanities of worldly science. Cruelty moral- 

 ized on the duty of stifling the appeals to the law of Nature. Des- 

 potism enforced the precepts of self-abasement and passive obedience. 

 Indolence welcomed the dogma of renunciation. The suppressed love 

 of natural science begat a chimera-brood of pseudo-sciences astrol- 

 ogy, necromancy, alchemy, demonology, exorcism, thaumaturgism. 

 Monkery and the neglect of rational agriculture conspired to turn 

 garden-lands into deserts and freemen into serfs. The suppression of 

 free inquiry begat hypocrisy and a mental sloth never equaled in the 

 darkest ages of pagan barbarism. Freedom, driven from the open 

 land, took refuge behind walled castles, and soon learned to make 

 might the measure of right. Feudalism was the result, rather than 

 the cause, of social degeneration. All the better instincts of the hu- 

 man mind were either suppressed or perverted by the influence of a 

 principle equally foreign to the philosophy of the pagan moralists and 

 the ethics of the Semitic religions so foreign, that the attempt to 

 amalgamate its doctrines with the manful monotheism of the Hebrew 

 lawgiver is the chief cause of those mysterious inconsistencies which 

 have so often frustrated the zeal of its propagandists : a benevolent 

 Allfather, who yet frightfully and eternally tortures a vast plurality 

 of his children ; a God-created earth, that must be renounced to avoid 

 the wrath of its creator ; a godlike body, fit only to be despised and 

 mortified. 



Yet that mystery was solved by the same key that unlocked the 

 etymological riddles of the Aryan languages the study of the Hin- 

 doo scriptures. As the Vedas elucidated the origin and development 

 of the Indo-Germanic tongues, the sacred writings of Buddhism re- 

 vealed the root-dogma that bore its logical fruit in self-torture and 

 renunciation : the doctrine of the worthlessness of earthly existence, 

 and the necessity of salvation by the suppression of all earthly desires. 

 According to the gospel of Buddha Sakyamuni, not the abuse of life, 

 but life itself, is an evil. All earthly blessings are curses in disguise. 

 The beauty of earth is the snare of the Maya, a mirage luring its 

 dupes from error to error toward grief and repentance. Only he who 

 has lifted the veil of that delusion has entered the path of salvation. 

 Total abstinence from the joys of life is the only cure for its ills, and 

 the highest goal of the future is Nirvana peace and absolute deliver- 

 ance from the vexations of earthly desires. 



In their progress from the banks of the Ganges to the shores of the 

 Atlantic those doctrines underwent various mystifying modifications, 

 and under the humanizing influence of pagan ethics Asceticism as- 

 sumed a meaning akin to that of Stoicism frugality, self-control, vir- 

 tuous preference of manly to effeminate pleasures. But, in the Ian- 



