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and took up little children in His arms and blessed them. Buddhism, 

 on the other hand, says, Avoid married life ; shun it as if it were 

 a burning pit of live coals ; or, having entered on it, abandon wife, 

 children, and home, and go about as celibate monks, engaging in 

 nothing but in meditation and recitation of the Buddha's Law 

 that is, if you aim at the highest degree of sanctification. And then 

 comes the important contrast, that no Christian trusts to his own 

 works as the sole meritorious cause of salvation, but is taught to 

 say, I have no merit of my own, and when I have done all I am an 

 unprofitable servant. Whereas Buddhism, on the contrary, teaches 

 that every man must trust to his own merits only. Fitly do the 

 rags worn by its monks symbolise the miserable patchwork of 

 its own self-righteousness. Not that Christianity ignores the 

 necessity for good works ; on the contrary, no other system insists 

 on a lofty morality so strongly, but only as a thank-offering only 

 as the outcome and evidence of faith never as the meritorious 

 instrument of salvation. 



" Lastly, I must advert again to the most important and essential 

 of all the distinctions which separate Christianity from Buddhism. 

 Christianity regards personal life as the most precious, the most 

 sacred of all possessions, and God himself as the highest example 

 of intense personality, the great ' I am that I am,' and teaches 

 us that we are to thirst for a continuance of personal life as a gift 

 for Him ; nay, more, that we are to thirst for the living God Him- 

 self and for conformity to His likeness ; while Buddhism sets forth 

 as the highest of all aims the utter extinction of personal identity 

 the utter annihilation of the Ego of all existence in any form 

 whatever, and proclaims, as the only true creed, the ultimate reso- 

 lution of everything into nothing, of every entity into pure non- 

 entity. What shall I do to inherit eternal life ? says the Christian. 

 What shall I do to inherit eternal extinction of life? says the Budd- 

 hist. It seems a mere absurdity to have to ask. in concluding this 

 address, Whom shall we choose as our guide, our hope, our salva- 

 tion ' the Light of Asia,' or ' the Light of the world ' ? the 

 Buddha, or the Christ ? It seems mere mockery to put this final 

 question to rational and thoughtful men in the nineteenth century: 

 Which book shall we clasp to our hearts in the hour of death the 

 book that tells us of the extinct man Buddha, or the Bible that 

 reveals to us the living Christ, the Redeemer of the World ? " 



