slavishly utilitarian in his teachings.  His ethics lacked symmetry and just proportion.  The five relations which constituted his ethico-political system were everything.  They were made the basis of inexorable social customs which sacrificed some of the tenderest and noblest promptings of the human heart.  Confucius mourned the death of his mother, for filial respect was a part of his system, but for his dying wife there is no evidence of grief or regret, and when his son mourned the death of his wife the philosopher reproved him.  In all things he reasoned upward toward the throne; his grand aim was to build up an ideal state.  He therefore magnified reverence for parents and all ancestors even to the verge of idolatry, but he utterly failed in that symmetry in which Paul makes the duties of parents and children mutual.  Under his system a father might exercise his caprice almost to the power of life or death, and a Chinese mother-in-law is proverbially a tyrant.  The beautiful sympathy of Christ, shown in blessing little children and in drawing lessons from their simple trust, would have been utterly out of place in the great sage of China.  Confucius seems to have troubled himself but slightly, if at all, about the wants of the poor and the suffering; he taught no doctrine of self-sacrifice for the ignorant and the unworthy.  His ideal of the “superior man” would have been tarnished by that contact with the lowly and degraded which was the glory of the Christ.  And when his cotemporary, Laotze, taught the duty of doing good, even to enemies, he repudiated the principle as uncalled for in the relative duties which should govern mankind.[213]

With respect to personality, probably a higher claim has been made for Gautama than for either of the characters who have been named.  Sir Edwin Arnold, in his preface to the “Light of Asia,” has assigned to him a virtual sinlessness, and such is doubtless the character which his followers would claim for him.  But as a model for the great masses of men Gautama was very far from perfection.  He had little of the genial sunlight of humanity; in every fibre of his nature he was a recluse; his views of life were pessimistic; he had no glad tidings for the sorrowing; no encouragement for the weary and the heavy laden.[214] His agnosticism was ill adapted to the irrepressible wants of mankind, for they must place their trust in a higher power, real or imagined.[215] But while he cast a cloud over the being of God he drove his despairing countrymen to the worship of serpents and evil spirits.  In Ceylon, which is par eminence an orthodox Buddhist country, ninety per cent. of the population are said to be devil worshippers, and the devil jugglers are patronized even by the Buddhist monks.[216] As the philosophy of Gautama was above the comprehension of the common people, so his example was also above their reach.  It utterly lacked the element of trust, and involved the very destruction of society.  To “wander apart like a rhinoceros”