e approach of man to his Creator
impossible without their intervention, Buddha must have produced at
once a powerful impression on the people at large, when breaking
through all the established rules of caste, he assumed the privileges
of a Brahman, and throwing away the splendour of his royal position,
travelled about as a beggar, not shrinking from the defiling contact
of sinners and publicans. Though when we now speak of Buddhism, we
think chiefly of its doctrines, the reform of Buddha had originally
much more of a social than of a religious character. Buddha swept away
the web with which the Brahmans had encircled the whole of India.
Beginning as the destroyer of an old, he became the founder of a new
religion. We can hardly understand how any nation could have lived
under a system like that of the Brahmanic hierarchy, which coiled
itself round every public and private act, and would have rendered
life intolerable to any who had forfeited the favour of the priests.
That system was attacked by Buddha. Buddha might have taught whatever
philosophy he pleased, and we should hardly have heard his name. The
people would not have minded him, and his system would only have been
a drop in the ocean of philosophical speculation, by which India was
deluged at all times. But when a young prince assembled round him
people of all castes, of all ranks, when he defeated the Brahmans in
public disputations, when he declared the sacrifices by which they
made their living not only useless but sinful, when instead of severe
penance or excommunications inflicted by the Brahmans sometimes for
the most trifling offences, he only required public confession of sin
and a promise to sin no more: when the charitable gifts hitherto
monopolised by the Brahmans, began to flow into new channels,
supporting hundreds and thousands of Buddhist mendicants, more had
been achieved than probably Buddha himself had ever dreamt of; and he
whose meditations had been how to deliver the soul of man from misery
and the fear of death, had delivered the people of India from a
degrading thraldom and from priestly tyranny.

The most important element of the Buddhist reform has always been its
social and moral code, not its metaphysical theories. That moral code,
taken by itself, is one of the most perfect which the world has ever
known. On this point all testimonies from hostile and from friendly
quarters agree. Spence Hardy, a Wesleyan Missionary, speaking of the