ght unto themselves and gave them authority to change all the lesser
precepts. It is true that the order decided to make no use of this
permission, but the spirit which dictated it has shaped the destinies of
the faith.

Akin to this contrast is another--that between the tolerance of Gotama
and the persecuting spirit of Islam. Mohammed and his followers never
got rid of the idea that any other form of religion is an insult to the
Almighty: that infidels should if possible be converted by compulsion,
or, if that were impossible, allowed to exist only on sufferance and in
an inferior position. Such ideas were unknown to Gotama. He laboured not
for his own or his Creator's glory but simply and solely to benefit
mankind. Conversion by force had no meaning for him, for what he desired
was not a profession of allegiance but a change of disposition and amid
many transformations his Church has not lost this temper.

When we come to compare Gotama and Christ we are struck by many
resemblances of thought but also by great differences of circumstances
and career. Both were truly spiritual teachers who rose above forms and
codes: both accepted the current ideals of their time and strove to
become the one a Buddha, the other Messiah. But at the age when Christ
was executed Gotama was still in quest of truth and still on the wrong
track. He lived nearly fifty years longer and had ample opportunity of
putting his ideas into practice. So far as our meagre traditions allow
us to trace the development of the two, the differences are even more
fundamental. Peaceful as was the latter part of Gotama's life, the
beginning was a period of struggle and disillusion. He broke away from
worldly life to study philosophy: he broke away from philosophy to wear
out his body with the severest mortification; that again he found to be
vanity and only then did he attain to enlightenment. And though he
offers salvation to all without distinction, he repeatedly says that it
is difficult: with hard wrestling has he won the truth and it is hard
for ordinary men to understand.

Troubled as was the life of Christ, it contains no struggle of this
sort. As a youth he grew up in a poor family where the disenchantment of
satiety was unknown: his genius first found expression in sermons
delivered in the synagogue--the ordinary routine of Jewish ritual: his
appearance as a public teacher and his ultimate conviction that he was
the Messiah were a natural enlargemen