abodes
of bliss which other poets created.

In demonstrable triumph the Buddha was then, as he has been since,
even if previously his existence had been omitted. But though he never
were, there nevertheless occurred a social revolution of which he was
the nominal originator and which, had it not been diverted into other
realms, might have resulted in Brahm's entire extinction.

Wolves do not devour each other. Ideals should not either. The
Oriental heavens were wide enough to serve as fastnesses for two sets
of hostile, germane, and ineffably poetic aberrations. There was room
even for more. There always should be. Of the divine one can have
never enough.

The gospel according to Sakya the Eremite is divine. It is divine in
its limitless compassion, and though compassion, when analyzed,
becomes but egotism in an etherialized form, yet the gospel had other
attractions. In demonstrating that life is evil, that rebirth is evil
too, that to be born even a god is evil still,--in demonstrating these
things, while insisting that all else, Buddhism included, is but
vanity, it fractured the charm of error in which man had been
confined.

Sakya saw men born and reborn in hell. He saw them ignorant, as
humanity has always been, unaware of their abjection as men are
to-day, and over the gulfs of existence, through the torrents of
rebirth, he offered to ferry them. But in the ferrying they had to
aid. The aid consisted in the rigorous observance of every virtue that
Christianity afterward professed. Therein is the beauty of Buddhism.
Its profundity resided in a revelation that everything human perishes
except actions and the consequences that ensue. To orthodox India its
tenets were as heretical as those of Christianity were to the Jews.
Nonetheless the doctrine became popular. But doctrines once
popularized lose their nobility. The degeneracy of Buddhism is due to
Cathay.

To the Hindu life was an incident between two eternities, an episode
in the string of deaths and rebirths. To Mongolians it was a unique
experience. They had no knowledge of the supersensible, no suspicion
of the ideal. Among them Buddhism operated a conversion. It stimulated
a thirst for the divine.

The thirst is unquenchable. Buddhism, in its simple severity, could
not even attempt to slake it. But on its simplicity a priesthood shook
parures. Its severity was cloaked with mantles of gold. The founder,
an atheist who had denied the gods, was transfor