MYSTICAL BUDDHISM. 45 
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 distinetions 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 ‘Iam 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 extinet man Buddha, or the Bible that 
reveals to us the living Christ, the Redeemer of the World ? 
