goes round and round in a circle; that nothing moves forward; that there is no new thing under the sun; that the sun rises and sets, and rises again; that the wind blows north and south, and east and west, and then returns according to its circuits.  Where can rest be found? where peace? where any certainty?  Siddartha was young; but he saw age approaching.  He was in health; but he knew that sickness and death were lying in wait for him.  He could not escape from the sight of this perpetual round of growth and decay, life and death, joy and woe.  He cried out, from the depths of his soul, for something stable, permanent, real.

Again, he was assured that this emancipation from change and decay was to be found in knowledge.  But by knowledge he did not intend the perception and recollection of outward facts,—­not learning.  Nor did he mean speculative knowledge, or the power of reasoning.  He meant intuitive knowledge, the sight of eternal truth, the perception of the unchanging laws of the universe.  This was a knowledge which was not to be attained by any merely intellectual process, but by moral training, by purity of heart and lite.  Therefore he renounced the world, and went into the forest, and became an anchorite.

But just at this point he separated himself from the Brahmans.  They also were, and are, believers in the value of mortification, abnegation, penance.  They had their hermits in his day.  But they believed in the value of penance as accumulating merit.  They practised self-denial for its own sake.  The Buddha practised it as a means to a higher end,—­emancipation, purification, intuition.  And this end he believed that he had at last attained.  At last he saw the truth.  He became “wide awake.”  Illusions disappeared; the reality was before him.  He was the Buddha,—­the MAN WHO KNEW.

Still he was a man, not a God.  And here again is another point of departure from Brahmanism.  In that system, the final result of devotion was to become absorbed in God.  The doctrine of the Brahmans is divine absorption; that of the Buddhists, human development.  In the Brahmanical system, God is everything and man nothing.  In the Buddhist, man is everything and God nothing.  Here is its atheism, that it makes so much of man as to forget God.  It is perhaps “without God in the world,” but it does not deny him.  It accepts the doctrine of the three worlds,—­the eternal world of absolute being; the celestial world of the gods, Brahma, Indra, Vischnu, Siva; and the finite world, consisting of individual souls and the laws of nature.  Only it says, of the world of absolute being, Nirvana, we know nothing.  That is our aim and end; but it is the direct opposite to all we know.  It is, therefore, to us as nothing.  The celestial world, that of the gods, is even of less moment to us.  What we know are the everlasting laws of nature, by obedience to which we rise, disobeying which we fall, by perfect obedience to which we shall at last obtain Nirvana, and rest forever.