Another point in common between this system and the spirit of our age is its broad humanitarianism—­beneficence to the lower grades of life.  When love transcends the bounds of the human family it does not rise up toward God, it descends toward the lower orders of the animal world.  “Show pity toward everything that exists,” is its motto, and the insect and the worm hold a larger relative place in the Buddhist than in the Christian view.  The question “Are ye not of more value than many sparrows?” might be doubtful in the Buddhist estimate, for the teacher himself, in his pre-existent states, had often been incarnate in inferior creatures.  It is by no means conceded that Jesus, in asking his disciples this question, had less pity for the sparrows than the Buddha, or that his beneficence was less thoughtful of the meanest thing that glides through the air or creeps upon the earth; but the spirit of Christianity is more discriminating, and its love rises up to heaven, where, beginning with God, it descends through every grade of being.

Yet it is quite in accordance with the spirit and aim of thousands to magnify the charity that confines itself to bodily wants and distresses, to sneer at the relief which religion may bring to the far greater anguish of the spirit, and to look upon love and loyalty to God as superstition.  Is it any wonder that such persons have a warm side toward Buddhism?  Again, this system has certain points in common with our modern evolution theories.  It is unscientific enough certainly in its speculations, but it gets on without creatorship or divine superintendence, and believes in the inflexible reign of law, though without a law-giver.  It assigns long ages to the process of creation, if we may call it creation, and in development through cycles it sees little necessity for the work of God.

It can also join hands cordially with many social theories of the day.  The pessimism of Buddhists, ancient or modern, finds great sympathy in the crowded populations of the Western as well as the Eastern world.  And, almost as a rule, Esoteric Buddhism, American Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism, or whatever we may call it, is a cave of Adullam to which all types of religious apostates and social malcontents resort.  The thousands who have made shipwreck of faith, who have become soured at the unequal allotments of Providence, who have learned to hate all who are above them and more prosperous than they, are just in the state of mind to take delight in Buddha’s sermon at Kapilavastu, as rehearsed by Sir Edwin Arnold.  There all beings met—­gods, devas, men, beasts of the field, and fowls of the air—­to make common cause against the relentless fate that rules the world, and to bewail the sufferings and death which fill the great charnel-house of existence, while Buddha voiced their common complaint and stood before them as the only pitying friend that the universe had found.  It was the first great Communist meeting of which we have any record.[88] The wronged and suffering universe was there, and all