CHAP. XI.] BUDDHISM DESTITUTE OF VITALITY. 537 



soul which are essential to ensure its ascendancy and 

 power. Its cold philosophy and thin abstractions, how- 

 ever calculated to exercise the faculties of anchorets and 

 ascetics, 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 and by a faith that penetrates eternity, has proved in 

 this instance an unredeemed and hopeless failure. The 

 inculcation of the social virtues as the consummation of 

 happiness here and hereafter, suggests an object sufficiently 

 attractive for the bulk of mankind ; but Buddhism pre- 

 sents along with it no adequate knowledge of the means 

 which are indispensable for its attainment. In confiding 

 ah 1 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 affords no consoling support under 

 those overwhelming afflictions by which the spirit is pros- 

 trated 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 un-ending realities of a future life are with- 

 drawn 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 punish- 

 ments too remote to deter him from vice. Thus, insuffi- 

 cient for time, and rejecting eternity, the utmost triumph 

 of his religion is to live without fear and to die without 

 hope. 



Both socially and in its effects upon individuals, the 

 result of the system in Ceylon has been apathy almost ap- 

 proaching to distrust. Even as regards the tenets of 

 their creed, the mass of the population exhibit the pro- 

 foundest ignorance and manifest the most irreverent in- 

 difference. In their daily intercourse and acts, morality 



