nothing. Hence the profound sadness of Buddhism. To
its eye all existence is evil, and the only hope is to escape from time
into eternity,--or into nothing,--as you may choose to interpret Nirvana.
While Buddhism makes God, or the good, and heaven, to be equivalent to
nothing, it intensifies and exaggerates evil. Though heaven is a blank,
hell is a very solid reality. It is present and future too. Everything in
the thousand hells of Buddhism is painted as vividly as in the hell of
Dante. God has disappeared from the universe, and in his place is only the
inexorable law, which grinds on forever. It punishes and rewards, but has
no love in it. It is only dead, cold, hard, cruel, unrelenting law. Yet
Buddhists are not atheists, any more than a child who has never heard of
God is an atheist. A child is neither deist nor atheist: he has _no_
theology.

The only emancipation from self-love is in the perception of an infinite
love. Buddhism, ignoring this infinite love, incapable of communion with
God, aiming at morality without religion, at humanity without piety,
becomes at last a prey to the sadness of a selfish isolation. We do not
say that this is always the case, for in all systems the heart often
redeems the errors of the head. But this is the logical drift of the
system and its usual outcome.

Sec. 9. Relation of Buddhism to Christianity.

In closing this chapter, let us ask what relation this great system
sustains to Christianity.

The fundamental doctrine and central idea of Buddhism is personal
salvation, or _the salvation of the soul by personal acts of faith and
obedience_. This we maintain, notwithstanding the opinion that some
schools of Buddhists teach that the soul itself is not a constant element
or a special substance, but the mere result of past merit or demerit. For
if there be no soul, there can be no transmigration. Now it is certain
that the doctrine of transmigration is the very basis of Buddhism, the
corner-stone of the system. Thus M. Saint-Hilaire says: "The chief and
most immovable fact of Buddhist metaphysics is the doctrine of
transmigration." Without a soul to migrate, there can be no migration.
Moreover, the whole ethics of the system would fall with its metaphysics,
on this theory; for why urge men to right conduct, in order to attain
happiness, or Nirvana, hereafter, if they are not to exist hereafter. No,
the soul's immortality is a radical doctrine in Buddhism, and this
doctrine