nd tribulation, a troubled sea through whose waves we
must pass before we reach our rest. And choirs sing, though without much
conviction, that it is weary waiting here. This language seems justified
by the Gospels and Epistles. It is true that some utterances of Christ
suggest that happiness is to be found in a simple and natural life of
friendliness and love, but on the whole both he and St Paul teach that
the world is evil or at least spoiled and distorted: to become a happy
world it must be somehow remade and transfigured by the second coming of
Christ. The desires and ambitions which are the motive power of modern
Europe are, if not wrong, at least vain and do not even seek for true
peace and happiness. Like Indian teachers, the early Christians tried to
create a right temper rather than to change social institutions. They
bade masters and slaves treat one another with kindness and respect, but
they did not attempt to abolish slavery.

Indian thought does not really go much further in pessimism than
Christianity, but its pessimism is intellectual rather than emotional.
He who understands the nature of the soul and its successive lives
cannot regard any single life as of great importance in itself, though
its consequences for the future may be momentous, and though he will not
say that life is not worth living. Reiterated declarations that all
existence is suffering do, it is true, seem to destroy all prospect of
happiness and all motive for effort, but the more accurate statement is,
in the words of the Buddha himself, that all clinging to physical
existence involves suffering. The earliest Buddhist texts teach that
when this clinging and craving cease, a feeling of freedom and happiness
takes their place and later Buddhism treated itself to visions of
paradise as freely as Christianity. Many forms of Hinduism teach that
the soul released from the body can enjoy eternal bliss in the presence
of God and even those severer philosophers who do not admit that the
released soul is a personality in any human sense have no doubt of its
happiness.

The opposition is not so much between Indian thought and the New
Testament, for both of them teach that bliss is attainable but not by
satisfying desire. The fundamental contrast is rather between both India
and the New Testament on the one hand and on the other the rooted
conviction of European races[47], however much Christian orthodoxy may
disguise their expression of it, th