6.  Many philosophic systems, ancient and modern, have tended to fill the world with gloomy pessimism.  Pessimism is very old and very widespread.  Schopenhauer acknowledges his indebtedness to Gautama for much of the philosophy which is known by his name.  In Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as in the teachings of the German pessimists, the natural complainings of the human heart are organized into philosophical systems.  There is in all human nature quite enough of querulousness against the unequal allotments of Providence, but all these systems inculcate and foster that discontent by the sanctions of philosophy.  The whole assumption of “The Light of Asia” is that the power that upholds and governs the world is a hard master, from whose leash we should escape if we can by annihilating our powers and faculties, and abdicating our conscious being; that the world and the entire constitution of things are all wrong; that misery is everywhere in the ascendant, and that man and beast can only make common cause against the tyranny of a reckless fate, and cry out with common voice for some sympathizing benefactor who can pity and deliver.  There is no hint that sin has wrought the evil.  Man is not so much a sinner as the victim of a hard lot; he is unfortunate, and it is the world that is wrong.  Therefore the true end of life is to get rid of the recurrence of life.

In much of our modern agnosticism there is the same dark outlook, and agnosticism naturally joins hands with pessimism.  Dr. Noah Porter, in one of the series of “Present-Day Tracts,” has shown it to be a doctrine of despair.  A well-known lecturer who has loudly declaimed against what he considers the remorseless character of the Old Testament, has acknowledged that it is not more cruel than nature; that in the actual world about us we find the same dark mystery, the weak perishing before the strong, the wicked prosperous, the just oppressed, and the innocent given as a prey to the guilty; and his conclusion is that deism is no more defensible than Christianity.  His pessimistic estimate of the actual world drives him to a disbelief in a personal God.

We do not ignore the sad facts of life; even the Christian is often saddened by the mysteries which he cannot explain.  Bishop J. Boyd Carpenter, in speaking of the sad and cheerless spirit of Buddhism, has said:  “There are moments in which we are all Buddhists; when life has disappointed us, when weariness is upon us, when the keen anguish born of the sight of human suffering appals and benumbs us, when we are frozen to terror, and our manhood flies at the sight of the Medusa-like head of the world’s unappeased and unappeasable agony; then we too are torn by the paroxysm of anguish; we would flee to the Nirvana of oblivion and unconsciousness, turning our back upon what we cannot alleviate, and longing to lay down the burden of life, and to escape from that which has become insupportable."[195] But these are only the dark and