It is not developed in us as it will be in our next round through earthly life, when, by its awakening, faith will become sight, and we shall know even as we are known.  Yet some there are, say the Buddhists, who have, by effort, already pushed their development to the point that most men will reach millions of years hence, when we shall return again, not to this life—­that we shall do perhaps in a few thousand years—­but to this planet.

It will be seen that the Buddhist idea of spirituality is very unlike our Christian idea.  The thought of man’s higher sense striving after the Divine, the whole conception, in short, of what the word spirituality suggests to modern thought, is impossible in a system of philosophy which has no personal God.  To apply the term religion to a scheme which has no place for the dependence of man upon a conscious protector, is to use the word in a sense entirely new to us.  Buddhism—­notwithstanding its claims to revelation—­is a philosophy, not a religion.

I have sketched, as well as I can in so short a time, what seem to me the main points in the book under review.  There are many things unexplained.  Of some of them, the author claims to have no knowledge.  Others he does not make clear; but, “take it for all in all,” the hook will probably give the reader a very great number of suggestions.  I am heterodox enough to say that if the idea of a personal God, the Father of all, were superadded to the system (or perhaps I ought to say were substituted for the idea of absorption into Nirvana), there would be nothing in Buddhism contradictory of Christianity.  What orthodox Christians of the present day and of this country believe with regard to eternal punishment is a question about which they do not altogether agree among themselves.  Whether the so-called hell is a place of everlasting degradation, is a point on which those who cannot deny to each other the name of Christian are not in accord.  Why, then, should it be thought heretical to maintain that the future world of rewards is also not eternal?  I believe that the Christian Scriptures use the same words with reference to both conditions—­

  “[Greek:  To pyr to aionion:—­eis xoen aionion.]”

The Buddhist denial of the eternity of the condition next following the separation of soul and body cannot, I think, be pronounced a subversion of Christian doctrine by any one who will admit that the Greek word [Greek:  aionios] may mean something less than endless.

Of the antiquity of Buddhistic philosophy, I have already spoken indirectly.  Buddha came upon the earth only 643 B.C.  But he was not the founder of the system.  His purpose in reincarnating himself at that time was to reform the lives of men.  Doubtless he made many explanations of doctrine, perhaps gave some new teaching; but the philosophy comes down to us from, at least, the times of the fourth root-race, the men of Atlantis.