y fails to commend itself. This is not due to the fact that
the Buddhist missionaries came by invitation, and ours do not. Nor is it
due to any want of personal character in these latter, but simply to an
excess of it in their doctrines.

For to-day the Far East is even more impersonal in its religion than are
those from whom that religion originally came. India has returned again
to its worship of Brahma, which, though impersonal enough, is less so
than is the gospel of Gautama. For it is passively instead of actively
impersonal.

Buddhism bears to Brahmanism something like the relation that
Protestantism does to Roman Catholicism. Both bishops and Brahmans
undertake to save all who shall blindly commit themselves to
professional guidance, while Buddhists and Protestants alike believe
that a man's salvation must be brought about by the action of the man
himself. The result is, that in the matter of individuality the two
reformed beliefs are further apart than those against which they
severally protested. For by the change the personal became more
personal, and the impersonal more impersonal than before. The
Protestant, from having tamely allowed himself to be led, began to take
a lively interest in his own self-improvement; while the Buddhist,
from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine of the universally
illusive, set to work energetically towards self-extinction. Curious
labor for a mind, that of devoting all its strength to the thinking
itself out of existence! Not content with being born impersonal, a Far
Oriental is constantly striving to make himself more so.

We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we
are brought face to face with impersonality in each of those three
expressions of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning. We have looked
at them first from a social standpoint. We have seen how singularly
little regard is paid the individual from his birth to his death. How
he lives his life long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerile
a tendency as to be practically impossible to a people really grown up.
How he practises a wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself to
destroy any surviving regard for the ego his other relations might
have left. How in his daily life he gives the minimum of thought to
the bettering himself in any worldly sense, and the maximum of polite
consideration to his neighbor. How, in short, he acts toward himself as
much as possible as if