and eternal, but recognizes also the world of time and space as real.  Man exists as well as God:  we love God, we must love man too.  Brahmanism loves God, but not man; it has piety, but not humanity.  Buddhism loves man, but not God; it has humanity, but not piety; or if it has piety, it is by a beautiful want of logic, its heart being wiser than its head.  That which seems an impossibility in these Eastern systems is a fact of daily life to the Christian child, to the ignorant and simple Christian man or woman, who, amid daily duty and trial, find joy in both heavenly and earthly love.

There is a reason for this in the inmost nature of Christianity as compared with Buddhism.  Why is it that Buddhism is a religion without God?  Sakya-muni did not ignore God.  The object of his life was to attain Nirvana, that is, to attain a union with God, the Infinite Being.  He became Buddha by this divine experience.  Why, then, is not this religious experience a constituent element in Buddhism, as it is in Christianity?  Because in Buddhism man struggles upward to find God, while in Christianity God comes down to find man.  To speak in the language of technical theology, Buddhism is a doctrine of works, and Christianity of grace.  That which God gives all men may receive, and be united by this community of grace in one fellowship.  But the results attained by effort alone, divide men; because some do more and receive more than others.  The saint attained Buddha, but that was because of his superhuman efforts and sacrifices; it does not encourage others to hope for the same result.

We see, then, that here, as elsewhere, the superiority of Christianity is to be found in its quantity, in its fulness of life.  It touches Buddhism at all its good points, in all its truths.  It accepts the Buddhistic doctrine of rewards and punishments, of law, progress, self-denial, self-control, humanity, charity, equality of man with man, and pity for human sorrow; but to all this it adds—­how much more!  It fills up the dreary void of Buddhism with a living God; with a life of God in man’s soul, a heaven here as well as hereafter.  It gives us, in addition to the struggle of the soul to find God, a God coming down to find the soul.  It gives a divine as real as the human, an infinite as solid as the finite.  And this it does, not by a system of thought, but by a fountain and stream of life.  If all Christian works, the New Testament included, were destroyed, we should lose a vast deal no doubt; but we should not lose Christianity; for that is not a book, but a life.  Out of that stream of life would be again developed the conception of Christianity, as a thought and a belief.  We should be like the people living on the banks of the Nile, ignorant for five thousand years of its sources; not knowing whence its beneficent inundations were derived; not knowing by what miracle its great stream could flow on and on amid the intense heats, where no rain falls,