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guesses of the savage. They had an elaborately constructed system of 
theogony, answering to what the New Testament calls the “genealogies,” of 
which the Apostle speaks (1 Tim. i. 4). But I am more familiar with some 
of the further Eastern systems — those of the Hindoos and the Buddhists ; 
and there is also another system, that of the Mahommedans, to which I may 
refer. The Hindoo system is a perpetual genealogy of false gods, tainted 
much more by the corruption of what is entirely human and carnal than 
almost any other ; in short, the very history of their gods is, in fact, the history 
of evil. Now, I maintain that there always was outside the chosen people a 
tradition of a belief in the true God. There is always some witness to the 
true God in some part of the world besides those who are to be found in God’s 
own Church, and one great blessing in the end will be that all these followers 
of the belief in the true God will be gathered up into God’s own family 
and brought to the true knowledge of Him, just as many of our Christian 
brethren, separated from us by many of the barriers of error and prejudice, 
will become — as indeed they now are, but more surely and really — our 
Christian brethren. But there are some especially who have raised up in 
those far-away portions of the world a protest against those elaborate 
systems of Polytheism, one of which is Buddhism and another Mahom- 
medanism. Let us take, for example, Buddhism. I firmly believe, although 
it is not one of those things that are brought before us by the learned 
writers on the subject, that the simplo history of Buddhism was the result 
of the effort made by one superior and comparatively pure-minded man — 
sincere, if fanatical — to attain the Truth and free himself from all these 
elaborate systems of Polytheism. He took, alas, a most mistaken line 
in endeavouring to do this. First of all, he preached Atheism, which 
by degrees became Pantheism ; but as the founder of Buddhism, what 
he taught was Atheism. I do not believe he meant to say, “There 
is no God.” I believe his meaning was that there were not these many 
gods, that there was no truth in what the people had heard of the family 
of gods — gods of evil men. He taught his false and mistaken principle 
that men, by their own inherent goodness, if they would only conquer 
their bodies and lower natures, might become first, better, then good, holy, 
and divine. That was, I think, the simple foundation of Buddhism ; and 
its author failed, for several reasons. I will not enter into the history of 
Buddhism, which is not a system of idolatry, but I will pass on to Mahom- 
medanism. If the founder of that system had not been an ambitious man, 
and I may say a carnal-minded man, although, undoubtedly, he had a great 
deal of wonderful power in him, he would have been more successful and 
more like the founder of Buddhism. He made a protest against two false 
systems — Polytheism and Idolatry, and although he put it on a false basis 
and carried it by the sword, his was a successful protest against Idolatry 
and Polytheism ; and I believe that at this moment, if tho followers 
of Mahomet could be induced to go back to tho point from which he went 
wrong, they might bo more easily brought to a true knowledge of Christ than 
