Nero onward with flattery and
encouragement to his most infamous vices and his boldest crimes.
Knowledge of ethical maxims and the power of expressing them, therefore,
is one thing, religion is another. Religion is a device, human or
divine, for raising up men by a real or a supposed supernatural aid. It
ought to reveal God as a helper and a Saviour. It ought to be a
provision of grace by which the Just can yet be a justifier of them that
are weak and wounded by sin. The ethical systems of the heathen world
corroborate the Scriptural diagnosis of man's character and condition,
but they fail as prescriptions. So far as divine help and regenerative
power are concerned, they leave the race helpless still.

Christianity is a system of faith in a moral as well as in an
intellectual sense. It inculcates a spirit of loving, filial trust
instead of a querulous self-righteousness which virtually chides the
unknown Ruler of the universe. According to "The Light of Asia" when the
Buddha preached at Kapilavastu there were assembled men and devils,
beasts and birds, all victims alike of the cruel fate that ruled the
world. Existence was an evil and only the Buddha could be found to pity.
But that pity offered no hope except in the destruction of hope, and the
destruction of all desire, all aspiration, even all feeling; while
Christianity offers a hope which maketh not ashamed, even an immortal
inheritance.[207] Hinduism also, like Islam and Buddhism, lacks every
element of divine salvation. It is wholly a thing of merit. The infinite
Brahm is said to be void of attributes of all kinds. No anthropomorphic
conception can be predicated of him. The three Gods of the Trimurti are
cold and distant--though for Vishnu in his alleged incarnation of
Krishna, a sympathetic nature was claimed at a later day--borrowed, some
say, from Buddhism, or, according to others, from Christianity. In the
Hindu saint all spiritual power in this life is the merit power of
ascetic austerities, all hope for the future world lies in the cleansing
efficacy of endless transmigrations of which the goal is absorption into
deity.

But the difficulty with both Buddhism and Hinduism is that
transmigration cannot regenerate. It is only a vague postponement of the
moral issues of the soul. There is recognized no future intervention
that can effect a change in the downward drift, and why should a
thousand existences prove better than one? According to a law of physics