idea, nor will.  As a consequence, the phenomena of the universe are wholly unrelated to it; all that is, is only illusion; it has no reality of being.  Human beings who think the world real, and who think even themselves real, are under the spell.  This illusion is the great misery and source of pain.  Salvation is the discovery of the illusion; and this discovery is the victory over it; for no one fears the lion’s skin, however much he may fear the lion.  This discovery secures the dropping back from the little, limited, individual self-line, into the infinite passionless, thoughtless, and motionless existence of the absolute being, Nirvana.

The Ancient Greek and not a little modern thought, conceived of the Ultimate as a thorough-going intellectualism.  One aspect of personality was perceived and emphasized.  God was conceived as a thinker, as one who contemplates the universe.  He does not create matter, nor force, nor does he rule them.  They are eternal and real, and subject to fate.  God simply observes.  He is absolute reason.  The Greek view is thus essentially dualistic.  Sin, from the Greek point of view, is merely ignorance, and salvation the attainment of knowledge.

In vital and vitalizing contrast to both the Buddhist and Greek conceptions is the Judaeo-Christian.  To the Christian the Ultimate is a thoroughgoing personality.  To him the central element in God is will, guided by reason and controlled by love and righteousness.  God creates and rules everything.  There is nothing that is not wholly subject to him.  There is no dualism for the Christian, nor any illusion.  Sin is an act of human will, not an illusion nor a failure of intellect.  Salvation is the correction of the will, which comes about through a “new birth.”

The elemental difference, then, between these three conceptions of the Ultimate is that in Buddhism the effort to rationalize and ethicize the universe of experience is abandoned as a hopeless task; the world entirely and completely resists the rational and ethical process.  The universe is pronounced completely irrational and non-moral.  Change is branded as illusion.  There is no room for progress in philosophic, thoroughgoing Buddhism.

In the Greek view the universe is subject in part to the rationalizing process; but only in part.  The effort at ethicization is entirely futile.  The Greek view, equally with the Buddhistic, is at a loss to understand change.  It does not brand it as unreal, but change produced by man is branded as a departure from nature.  Greeks and Hindus alike have no philosophy of history.  In the Christian view the universe is completely subject to the rational and ethical process.  God is creator of all that is and it is necessarily good.  God is an active will and He is, therefore, still in the process of creating; hence change, evolution, is justified and understood.  History is rational and has a philosophy.  Evolution and revelation have their place at the very heart of the universe.  Hence it is that science, philosophy, and history, in a word a high-grade civilization, finds its intellectual justification, its foundation, its primary postulates, its possibility, only in a land permeated with the Christian idea of God.