Christianity is a system of faith in a moral as well as in an intellectual sense.  It inculcates a spirit of loving, filial trust instead of a querulous self-righteousness which virtually chides the unknown Ruler of the universe.  According to “The Light of Asia” when the Buddha preached at Kapilavastu there were assembled men and devils, beasts and birds, all victims alike of the cruel fate that ruled the world.  Existence was an evil and only the Buddha could be found to pity.  But that pity offered no hope except in the destruction of hope, and the destruction of all desire, all aspiration, even all feeling; while Christianity offers a hope which maketh not ashamed, even an immortal inheritance.[207] Hinduism also, like Islam and Buddhism, lacks every element of divine salvation.  It is wholly a thing of merit.  The infinite Brahm is said to be void of attributes of all kinds.  No anthropomorphic conception can be predicated of him.  The three Gods of the Trimurti are cold and distant—­though for Vishnu in his alleged incarnation of Krishna, a sympathetic nature was claimed at a later day—­borrowed, some say, from Buddhism, or, according to others, from Christianity.  In the Hindu saint all spiritual power in this life is the merit power of ascetic austerities, all hope for the future world lies in the cleansing efficacy of endless transmigrations of which the goal is absorption into deity.

But the difficulty with both Buddhism and Hinduism is that transmigration cannot regenerate.  It is only a vague postponement of the moral issues of the soul.  There is recognized no future intervention that can effect a change in the downward drift, and why should a thousand existences prove better than one?  According to a law of physics known as the persistence of force, a body once set in motion will never stop unless through the intervention of some other resisting force.  And this is strikingly true of moral character and the well-known power and momentum of habit.  Who shall change the leopard’s spots or deflect the fatal drift of a human soul?  Remorselessly these Oriental systems exact from Kharma the uttermost farthing.  They emphasize the fact that according to the sowing shall be the reaping, and that in no part of the universe can ill desert escape its awards.  Even if change were possible, therefore, how shall the old score be settled?  What help, what rescue can mere infinitude of time afford, though the transmigrations should number tens of thousands?  There is no hint that any pitying eye of God or devil looks upon the struggle, or any arm is stretched forth to raise up the crippled and helpless soul.  Time is the only Saviour—­time so vast, so vague, so distant, that the mind cannot follows its cycles or trace the relations of cause and effect.