ating our conscious
being; that the world and the entire constitution of things are all
wrong; that misery is everywhere in the ascendant, and that man and
beast can only make common cause against the tyranny of a reckless
fate, and cry out with common voice for some sympathizing benefactor who
can pity and deliver. There is no hint that sin has wrought the evil.
Man is not so much a sinner as the victim of a hard lot; he is
unfortunate, and it is the world that is wrong. Therefore the true end
of life is to get rid of the recurrence of life.

In much of our modern agnosticism there is the same dark outlook, and
agnosticism naturally joins hands with pessimism. Dr. Noah Porter, in
one of the series of "Present-Day Tracts," has shown it to be a doctrine
of despair. A well-known lecturer who has loudly declaimed against what
he considers the remorseless character of the Old Testament, has
acknowledged that it is not more cruel than nature; that in the actual
world about us we find the same dark mystery, the weak perishing before
the strong, the wicked prosperous, the just oppressed, and the innocent
given as a prey to the guilty; and his conclusion is that deism is no
more defensible than Christianity. His pessimistic estimate of the
actual world drives him to a disbelief in a personal God.

We do not ignore the sad facts of life; even the Christian is often
saddened by the mysteries which he cannot explain. Bishop J. Boyd
Carpenter, in speaking of the sad and cheerless spirit of Buddhism, has
said: "There are moments in which we are all Buddhists; when life has
disappointed us, when weariness is upon us, when the keen anguish born
of the sight of human suffering appals and benumbs us, when we are
frozen to terror, and our manhood flies at the sight of the Medusa-like
head of the world's unappeased and unappeasable agony; then we too are
torn by the paroxysm of anguish; we would flee to the Nirvana of
oblivion and unconsciousness, turning our back upon what we cannot
alleviate, and longing to lay down the burden of life, and to escape
from that which has become insupportable."[195] But these are only the
dark and seemingly forsaken hours in which men sit in despair beneath
the juniper-tree and imagine that all the world has gone wrong. The
juniper-tree in Christianity is the exception; the Bo-tree of Buddhism,
with the same despondent estimate, is the rule. No divine message came
to show the Buddha a brighter side. And t