necessary in expounding it to contrast it with
the two remaining types; namely, the Greek and the Christian. As
already pointed out, according to the Buddhistic conception, the
Ultimate is a thoroughgoing Abstraction. All the elements of
personality are denied. It is perfectly passionless, perfectly
thoughtless, and perfectly motionless. It has neither feeling, idea,
nor will. As a consequence, the phenomena of the universe are wholly
unrelated to it; all that is, is only illusion; it has no reality of
being. Human beings who think the world real, and who think even
themselves real, are under the spell. This illusion is the great
misery and source of pain. Salvation is the discovery of the illusion;
and this discovery is the victory over it; for no one fears the lion's
skin, however much he may fear the lion. This discovery secures the
dropping back from the little, limited, individual self-line, into
the infinite passionless, thoughtless, and motionless existence of the
absolute being, Nirvana.

The Ancient Greek and not a little modern thought, conceived of the
Ultimate as a thorough-going intellectualism. One aspect of
personality was perceived and emphasized. God was conceived as a
thinker, as one who contemplates the universe. He does not create
matter, nor force, nor does he rule them. They are eternal and real,
and subject to fate. God simply observes. He is absolute reason. The
Greek view is thus essentially dualistic. Sin, from the Greek point of
view, is merely ignorance, and salvation the attainment of knowledge.

In vital and vitalizing contrast to both the Buddhist and Greek
conceptions is the Judaeo-Christian. To the Christian the Ultimate is a
thoroughgoing personality. To him the central element in God is will,
guided by reason and controlled by love and righteousness. God creates
and rules everything. There is nothing that is not wholly subject to
him. There is no dualism for the Christian, nor any illusion. Sin is
an act of human will, not an illusion nor a failure of intellect.
Salvation is the correction of the will, which comes about through a
"new birth."

The elemental difference, then, between these three conceptions of the
Ultimate is that in Buddhism the effort to rationalize and ethicize
the universe of experience is abandoned as a hopeless task; the world
entirely and completely resists the rational and ethical process. The
universe is pronounced completely irrational and non-moral. Change