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“firstfruits” in the countries ; but these, alas ! do not attain their 
piety in consequence but in spite of the fearfully corrupt and false 
traditions in which they have been trained passively to believe. 
Now it was to escape from such manifest superstition and 
degradations of belief itself that the founder of Buddhism pro- 
pounded his comparatively pure system of teaching, denying 
the deities or forms of deity in successive incarnations which 
were accepted by the Hindu worshipper, as taught him by his 
priest, and figured to his sight in the representations on the 
walls of his temple. I have in my possession a faithful descrip- 
tion, by one belonging to the country, of what Brahminism 
really is, showing what are the views of the Brahmins ; but it 
is a description which I should not like to read to a meeting, 
so grossly impure are the things which they believe of 
their Gods. I ought also to mention that what I have said 
as to the founder of Buddhism endeavouring to escape 
from such superstitions is simply my own theory of the 
origin of Buddhism. 1 have no real historical authority 
for it, but it is my own explanation of the founder of Bud- 
dhism coming forth with the declaration that he did not 
believe in a God. God, he explained, is everywhere, in every- 
thing; but when he went further, denying creation or actual 
government as attributable to a living God, he erred, of course, 
and the error pervaded all the rest of his teaching. He taught 
a system of morality in itself very full of excellence ; he pre- 
pared a body of priests who, living in absolute austerity, should 
be above the people whom they instructed, escape the corrup- 
tions which had disgraced the order in the vast majority of 
those with whom he had been familiar ; and, for the worship 
which had but served them as an instrument of evil, he substi- 
tuted what he would fain have thought a harmless abstraction 
— isolation of thought, to which in time was naturally added 
honour paid to himself. And thus you have the system as it 
exists at this day— a negative religion — a morality singularly 
incorrupt, though not free from error even in its ethical prin- 
ciples ; and a priesthood, on the whole, very faithful to their 
traditions, and not without zeal for the teaching those tradi- 
tions to their people; the first impetus, indeed, of the foun- 
der’s zeal sufficing to make them successful in obtaining exten- 
sion scarcely inferior to that which they displaced, and soon, 
indeed, numbering millions of followers, as the quiet growth of 
assent went on in these Eastern minds ; and even now, when 
Christianity has come into the field to dispute their supre- 
macy, not easily or soon yielding before the yet higher pre- 
cepts of moral teaching, and the far more reasonable require- 
