No doubt the same idea is found in Christianity.  Personal salvation is herein included.  But Christianity starts from a very different point:  it is the “kingdom of Heaven.”  “Thy kingdom come:  thy will be done on earth.”  It is not going on away from time to find an unknown eternity.  It is God with us, eternity here, eternal life abiding in us now.  If some narrow Protestant sects make Christianity to consist essentially in the salvation of our own soul hereafter, they fall into the condemnation of Buddhism.  But that is not the Christianity of Christ.  Christ accepts the great prophetic idea of a Messiah who brings down God’s reign into this life.  It is the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven.  It is the earth full of the knowledge of God, as the waters cover the sea.  It is all mankind laboring together for this general good.

This solitary preoccupation with one’s own salvation causes the religious teachers of Buddhism to live apart, outside of society, and take no interest in it.  There is in the Catholic and Protestant world, beside the monk, a secular priesthood, which labors to save other men’s bodies and souls.  No such priesthood exists in Buddhism.

Moreover, not the idea of salvation from evil,—­which keeps before us evil as the object of contemplation,—­but the idea of good, is the true motive for the human conscience.  This leads us up at once to God; this alone can create love.  We can only love by seeing something lovely.  God must seem, not terrible, but lovely, in order to be loved.  Man must seem, not mean and poor, but noble and beautiful, before we can love him.  This idea of the good does not appear in Buddhism, says M. Saint-Hilaire.  Not a spark of this divine flame—­that which to see and show has given immortal glory to Plato and to Socrates—­has descended on Sakya-muni.  The notion of rewards, substituted for that of the infinite beauty, has perverted everything in his system.

Duty itself becomes corrupted, as soon as the idea of the good disappears.  It becomes then a blind submission to mere law.  It is an outward constraint, not an inward inspiration.  Scepticism follows.  “The world is empty, the heart is dead surely,” is its language.  Nihilism arrives sooner or later.  God is nothing; man is nothing; life is nothing; death is nothing; eternity is nothing.  Hence the profound sadness of Buddhism.  To its eye all existence is evil, and the only hope is to escape from time into eternity,—­or into nothing,—­as you may choose to interpret Nirvana.  While Buddhism makes God, or the good, and heaven, to be equivalent to nothing, it intensifies and exaggerates evil.  Though heaven is a blank, hell is a very solid reality.  It is present and future too.  Everything in the thousand hells of Buddhism is painted as vividly as in the hell of Dante.  God has disappeared from the universe, and in his place is only the inexorable law, which grinds on forever.  It punishes and rewards, but has no love in it.  It is only dead, cold, hard, cruel, unrelenting law.  Yet Buddhists are not atheists, any more than a child who has never heard of God is an atheist.  A child is neither deist nor atheist:  he has no theology.