It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism and immanence.  And it is just here that Christianity is on the side of humanity and liberty and love.  Love desires personality; therefore love desires division.  It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces.  It is her instinct to say “little children love one another” rather than to tell one large person to love himself.  This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.  The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it.  But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it.  The oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him.  We come back to the same tireless note touching the nature of Christianity; all modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free.  No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.  But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God and man is sacred, because this is eternal.  That a man may love God it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved, but a man to love him.  All those vague theosophical minds for whom the universe is an immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which shrink instinctively from that earthquake saying of our Gospels, which declare that the Son of God came not with peace but with a sundering sword.  The saying rings entirely true even considered as what it obviously is; the statement that any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate.  It is as true of democratic fraternity as of divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed.  Yet there is another and yet more awful truth behind the obvious meaning of this utterance of our Lord.  According to Himself the Son was a sword separating brother and brother that they should for an aeon hate each other.  But the Father also was a sword, which in the black beginning separated brother and brother, so that they should love each other at last.

This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the eyes of the mediaeval saint in the picture.  This is the meaning of the sealed eyes of the superb Buddhist image.  The Christian saint is happy because he has verily been cut off from the world; he is separate from things and is staring at them in astonishment.  But why should the Buddhist saint be astonished at things? since there is really only one thing, and that