seemingly forsaken hours in which men sit in despair beneath the juniper-tree and imagine that all the world has gone wrong.  The juniper-tree in Christianity is the exception; the Bo-tree of Buddhism, with the same despondent estimate, is the rule.  No divine message came to show the Buddha a brighter side.  And the agnostic stops his ears that no voice of cheer may be heard.  The whole philosophy of Buddhism and of modern agnosticism is pessimistic.  The word and Spirit of God do not deny the sad facts of human life in a world of sin, but they enable the Christian to triumph over them, and even to rejoice in tribulation.

7.  And this leads to one more common feature of all false systems, their fatalism.  Among the exaggerated claims which are made for heathen religions in our day, it is alleged that they rest upon a more humane philosophy than appears in the grim fatalism of our Christian theology, especially that of the Calvinistic type.  Without entering upon any defence of Christian doctrines of one type or another, it would be easy to show that fatalism, complete and unmitigated, is at the foundation of all Oriental religion and philosophy, all ancient or modern pantheism, and most of the various types of agnosticism.  While this has been the point at which all infidel systems have assailed the Christian faith, it has nevertheless been the goal which they have all reached by their own speculations.  They have differed from Christianity in that their predestinating, determining force, instead of being qualified by any play of free-will, or any feasible plan of ultimate and superabounding good, has been a real fatalism, changeless, hopeless, remorseless.  That the distaff of the Fates, and the ruthless sceptre of the Erinnys, entered in full force into all the religions of the Greeks and Romans, scarcely needs to be affirmed.  They controlled all human affairs, and even the gods were subject to them.  The Sagas of the Northmen also were full of fatalism, and that principle still survives in the folk-lore and common superstitions of all Scandinavian, Teutonic, and Celtic races.

The fatalism of the Hindus is plainly stated in the “Code of Manu,” which declares that, “in order to distinguish actions, he (the creator) separated merit from demerit.  To whatever course of action the Lord appointed each kind of being, that alone it has spontaneously adopted in each succeeding creation.  Whatever he has assigned to each at the first creation, noxiousness or harmlessness, gentleness or ferocity, virtue or sin, truth or falsehood, that clings to it."[196] The same doctrine is put in still more offensive form when it is declared that “Manu (here used in the sense of creator) allotted to woman a love of her bed, of her seat, of ornament, also impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, and bad conduct."[197] There would be some relief from this horrible doctrine if in subsequent chapters of Manu there were kindly tokens of grace, or sympathy for woman, or any light of hope here or