s of God in the movement of the stars,
in the falling of a stone, in the stir of the great waters, so this
Newton of the spiritual world sought for the secrets of life and death,
looking deep into the heart of man, marking its toil, its suffering, its
little joys, with a soul attuned to catch every quiver of the life of
the world. And as to Newton truth did not come spontaneously, did not
reveal itself to him at his first call, but had to be sought with toil
and weariness, till at last he reached it where it hid in the heart of
all things, so it was with the prince. He was not born with the
knowledge in him, but had to seek it as every other man has done. He
made mistakes as other men do. He wasted time and labour following wrong
roads, demonstrating to himself the foolishness of many thoughts. But,
never discouraged, he sought on till he found, and what he found he
gave as a heritage to all men for ever, that the way might be easier for
them than it had been for him.

Nothing is more clear than this: that to the Buddhist his teacher was
but a man like himself, erring and weak, who made himself perfect, and
that even as his teacher has done, so, too, may he if he do but observe
the everlasting laws of life which the Buddha has shown to the world.
These laws are as immutable as Newton's laws, and come, like his, from
beyond our ken.

And this, too, is another point wherein the parallel with Newton will
help us: that just as when Newton discovered gravitation he was obliged
to stop, for his knowledge of that did not lead him at once to the
knowledge of the infinite, so when he had attained the laws of
righteousness, Gaudama the Buddha also stopped, because here his
standing-ground failed. It is not true, that which has been imputed to
the Buddha by those who have never tried to understand him--that he
denied some power greater than ourselves; that because he never tried to
define the indefinite, to confine the infinite within the corners of a
phrase, therefore his creed was materialistic. We do not say of Newton
that he was an atheist because when he taught us of gravity he did not
go further and define to us in equations Him who made gravity; and as we
understand more of the Buddha, as we search into life and consider his
teaching, as we try to think as he thought, and to see as he saw, we
understand that he stopped as Newton stopped, because he had come to the
end of all that he could see, not because he declared that