to mankind the Christ and
the Buddha. For the eastern flavour of their messages and the Oriental
tints of their life we are deeply grateful. To those of the West,
these have always brought quiet restraint and a hallowed, peaceful
repose to counteract the hurry and worry of life to which they are so
much exposed and which are a part of their very being.

II

_The Common Principles which controlled their Lives_

Both were men of deepest sincerity. All sham and hypocrisy were
foreign to their nature; they held insincerity in any one to be the
meanest and most deadly sin. To this intense loyalty to the truth,
Jesus bore emphatic testimony by an early martyrdom; while Gautama
gave the same unwavering witness by a long and holy life. They both
stood in the midst of communities which were rotten with hypocrisy and
which were using religion as a sacred garb of duplicity and were
raising temples of dishonesty to enraged deity. They stood like
prophets in the wilderness and pronounced woe upon all hypocrites.

Moreover, both Christ and Buddha were profoundly ethical in their
teaching. They found that humanity was not only rotten with
insincerity, it was also deceiving itself with the vain delusion that
moral integrity and ethical nobility can be bartered for a
multitudinous ceremonial. Men have always been prone to exalt ritual
in proportion as they have neglected the eternal demands of conscience
and the ethical foundation of character. The myriad-tongued
ceremonial of the Brahmans of twenty-five centuries ago was the old
evasion of righteousness in human life. Gautama saw this, and his
noble soul rebelled against a faith which proclaimed that salvation
was a thing of outward religious forms and not of the heart within.

"To cease from all sin,
To get virtue,
To cleanse our own heart,
This is the religion of the Buddhas."

These were the words with which he enunciated his new principles and
carried forward his campaign of reaction against the faith of his
fathers. Nothing less than, or apart from, purity of the soul within
satisfied his requirement.

Indeed, he exalted so much the more highly this banner of heart purity
and holiness, the less he had to say of the spiritual claims upon the
soul. He had tried elaborate ceremonial and had found it wanting; he
had practised the most severe religious austerities, but they had
availed him little. In the quiet light which had dawned upon him under
the sacre