he Father that He would sanctify His
own, and added that for their sakes He sanctified Himself. Holiness
was a passion with Him, and at the basis of His teaching He enjoined
moral cleanness and ethical integrity. And His life in this, as in
other things, was a perfect exhibition of the virtues which He taught.
And from that day to this His precept and example have mutually
supported each other. In Him were wedded faith and conscience, piety
and character. So that, where Christ is best known and most loyally
followed to-day, there do we find a perfect sense of human relations
and a supreme desire after ethical perfection.

Furthermore, these two great souls were consumed with a broad and
universal charity. Their environment was perhaps the most averse to
general benevolence that the world could then show. In India, there
had already grown to great power the caste system with its multiplying
ramifications. Then, as now, it narrowed the sympathies of men, it
arrayed one class against another, it cultivated pride and fostered
mutual distrust and dissension.

When Sakya Muni came upon the scene, he saw the terribly divisive
system sending down its root like the banyan tree on all sides and
absorbing the life and thought of the people. It repelled him, and,
with all his mighty intellectual and moral energy, he attacked it. He
proclaimed all men brothers and worthy of human sympathy, love, and
respect. He opened the door of his faith to all classes on equal
terms. He vehemently opposed every effort to divide men except upon
the ground of character. He enjoined upon his disciples not only love
and kindness to all men, he also insisted upon a similar attitude
toward all forms of lower life.

The fact that Buddhism is to-day one of the three great Missionary
Faiths of the world, seeking all men that are in darkness, is the best
proof that the founder of that faith had a heart which embraced the
whole realm of life in its love. He felt that no man, however humble
or however far removed in ties of race and kinship, should be deprived
of the blessings of his love and sympathy. It is an interesting fact
that nearly all past religious reformers in India--both those inside
and outside the pale of Brahmanism--were anti-caste in their
sympathies and teaching. But it is only Buddha who consistently
maintained the broad foundation of a universal brotherhood and
incorporated it into his faith as a cardinal principle.

In like manner, J