5.  Christ and his disciples set before men the highest motives of life.  The great end of man was to love God supremely, and one’s neighbor as himself.  Every true disciple was to consider himself an almoner and dispenser of the divine goodness to his race.  It was this that inspired the sublime devotion of Paul and of thousands since his time.  It is the secret principle of all the noblest deeds of men.  Gautama had no such high and unselfish aim.  He found no inspiring motive above the level of humanity.  His system concentrates all thought and effort on one’s own life—­virtually on the attainment of utter indifference to all things else.  The early zeal of Gautama and his followers in preaching to their fellow-men was inconsistent with the plain doctrines taught at a later day.  If in any case there were those who, like Paul, burned with desire to save their fellow-men, all we can say is, they were better than their creed.  Such was the spirit of the Gospel, rather than the idle and useless torpor of the Buddhist order.  “Here, according to Buddhists,” says Spence Hardy, “is a mere code of proprieties, an occasional opiate, a plan for being free from discomfort, a system for personal profit.”  Buddhism certainly taught the repression of human activity and influence.  Instead of saying, “Let your light so shine before men that they, seeing your good works, may glorify your Father who is in heaven,” or “Work while the day lasts,” it said, “If thou keepest thyself silent as a broken gong, thou hast attained Nirvana.”  “To wander about like the rhinoceros alone,” was enjoined as the pathway of true wisdom.

6.  Christ taught that life, though attended with fearful alternatives, is a glorious birthright, with boundless possibilities and promise of good to ourselves and others.  Buddhism makes life an evil which it is the supreme end of man to conquer and cut off from the disaster of re-birth.  Christianity opens a path of usefulness, holiness, and happiness in this life, and a career of triumph and glory in the endless ages to come.  Both Buddhism and Hinduism are worse than other pessimistic systems in their fearful law of entailment through countless transmigrations, each of which must be a struggle.

7.  Christ, according to the New Testament, “ever liveth to make intercession for us,” and the Holy Spirit represents Him constantly as an ever-living power in the world, to regenerate, save, and bless.  But Buddha is dead, and his very existence is a thing of the past.  Only traditions and the influence of his example can help men in the struggle of life.  Said Buddha to his disciples:  “As a flame blown by violence goes out and cannot be reckoned, even so a Buddha delivered from name and body disappears and cannot be reckoned as existing.”  Again, he said to his Order, “Mendicants, that which binds the Teacher (himself) is cut off, but his body still remains.  While this body shall remain he will be seen by gods and men, but after the termination of life, upon the dissolution of the body, neither gods nor men shall see him.”