In the famous debate on the nature of religion which was started in the eighteenth century, it was maintained by Kant that religion serves the practical purpose of safeguarding the most important of human interests. Its function, he conceived, was to support and to round off the moral life. If man is to realise his moral ideal—as he ought to do, and is therefore able to do—he must believe in a future existence in which he will have the opportunity of going on to perfection; and if the future state is to satisfy his just expectations, it will be one in which matured goodness will be placed in an appropriate setting of perfected happiness. This result, however, cannot be produced by the blind and mechanical forces of nature, and so man has postulated the existence of God as the necessary condition for the attainment of his summum bonum.1 The good man, in short, cannot but believe in a heaven, and he cannot expect a heaven, unless there be a God to build it. In principle Kant was right, but he interpreted the service of religion too narrowly. More has been expected of God within the sphere of the moral life than was thus recognised, and more has been expected of God in other departments of experience. The good man has usually asked for more at the hand of God than that He should see to it that virtue will be duly honoured and provided for in the end. He has felt the need of God, not only to render to goodness its due, but still more to help him to become good, and to persevere in goodness. Kant was deeply impressed with the depravity of human nature, and it might therefore have seemed to him to be necessary to apply to God for moral power, but he ignored or belittled this aspiration, because of his aversion to demands being made on God which appeared to be inconsistent with the autonomy of the human will, and also to undermine responsibility. Further, the hopes placed on religion have had a wider range than the confines of the moral life. When the question is taken to be, not why men should seek God, but what they have expected from the cultivation of relations with the Divine Being, it is seen that a formula is required which embraces goods of all kinds. Feuerbach proposed happiness as a comprehensive definition of the end which has been normally contemplated, and in this he was followed, with a caveat against his sceptical inferences, by Kaftan and other Lutheran theologians.2 Pfleiderer distinguished two ends—one the satisfaction of a mystical disposition, the other the attainment of perfection of life in union with God.3 That the intention of religion has been essentially practical has also been generally recognised from the anthropological side. ‘Religion,’ says Sir James Frazer, ‘has consisted of two elements—belief in powers higher than man, and an attempt to propitiate or please them,’ and he gives the primacy to the practical aspect in the eventual definition of the aim as ‘the propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.’4 In the philosophical schools religion is now usually regarded as being concerned with values. Some, following Höffding, have restricted its intention to the conservation of existing values. Others have maintained that this was part, but only part, of its programme. ‘Heaven has been pictured in many different ways,’ says Professor Sorley, ‘but never as simply a museum of moral progress up to date.’5

The practical interpretation of religion, as it has been termed, gives prominence to the purpose which has been most conspicuously and constantly in evidence throughout the course of religious history. However much more religion has been thought to be and to accomplish, it has been generally believed that, in the apostle’s phrase, godliness was profitable—that it had its aspect of utility equally with the works by which man is defended against the dangers that encompass his lot, is supplied with food, raiment and shelter, and is rejoiced by the satisfaction of his higher wants. Religion might further be defined as an optimism whose foundations are laid in pessimism. Every positive faith that has played an influential part in the history of the race has begun with a diagnosis of the natural condition of man, and has given out the provisional estimate that human life is full of grievous evils which are likely to become worse and worse. But each also went on to the assurance that, subject to the fulfilment of conditions, man might hope to be delivered from the evils, and to attain a condition of well-being with the characters of a salvation. Before Philosophy discoursed of values—a term which may be disliked for its foreign accent, or as smacking of the market- place—the religious vocabulary had more dignified equivalents with their aroma of piety: as blessings, benefits, mercies and good things. Religious thought has taken cognisance, as elements of a salvation, of all the higher kinds of values now generally recognised, and it has included within the range of its interests other kinds that are peculiar to itself. The table of values with which religion has been concerned might be constructed as follows:

Physical—health and length of days.

Social—wealth, power, honour, kindred and friends.

Emotional—blessedness.

Spiritual—

(a) General—truth, beauty, goodness.

(b) Religious—God and gifts of grace.6

The physical and social values have figured largely in religious thinking as material and temporal blessings. The emotional values include peace of mind, joyfulness and the affective aspects of hope and love. The intellectual values are truth and the possession thereof; the aesthetic are connected with the world of the beautiful and the sublime; the moral are represented by the good will and by the embodiment of goodness in character and life. If full account be taken of the content of spiritual experience a place must also be found in the table for values of the specifically religious kind. These last are of two forms—an objective relationship and a subjective state. The relationship is of the nature of sonship or friendship, and involves access to the presence of God and the enjoyment of His favour. The subjective condition is an assimilation to the life of God which is known in ordinary experience as sanctification, and in saintly experience is intensified into a sense of vital union with God. The values have also been classified from the formal point of view as intrinsic and instrumental, permanent and transient, catholic and exclusive, higher and lower; and parallel distinctions have been worked out by theological thought.

While the common and persistent doctrine has been that religion is the means of escape from the worst of evils, and of the attainment of the best blessings, opinion has varied widely at different stages as to the nature of the boons that make up the highest good, and also as to the corresponding evils from which deliverance is to be sought. It is also observable that at one time it has been the community, at another the individual, that has been regarded as the chief recipient of the religious blessings. The synthesis of ideas in respect of the need and the content of salvation may be reduced to three main types, which have been closely, and no doubt organically, connected with the leading forms of the idea of God. The first type, which is associated with Polydaemonism and Polytheism, though it also continued to make its influence felt at later stages, may be termed the mundane theory of salvation. Its essential doctrine is that evil is calamity, and that salvation is prosperity. This conception has also usually been bound up with the view that the benefits of religion are primarily for the group, and only consequentially for the individual units. The second type of thought, which may be called the fugitive ideal, was chiefly developed in connection with Indian Pantheism. Its diagnosis of human life was that it is full of misery, and its great and precious promise was emancipation and rest. It is, further, the individual to whom this gospel has been specially addressed. The third type, which was moulded under the influence of ethical Monotheism, and has its ideal exposition in the Biblical literature, has promised a plenary salvation. The distinctive feature of the theistic doctrine is that the worst of the evils of man’s condition is sin, and that a true salvation must have as its core forgiveness and sanctification, while it also incorporates the lesser mercies that make for complete blessedness.

I

The mundane theory, as we have termed it, which estimates life and religion in terms of temporal well-being, is met with in its purity in Animism. The conditions among savage and semi-savage tribes are such as to make them feel that a salvation of the temporal sort is sorely needed. ‘The legend of the happy heathen,’ says Warneck, ‘the contented and joyful children of nature, hardly needs to be contradicted to-day. The truth is that misery in every form—poverty, hunger, slavery and cruelty—is the inseparable companion of animistic heathendom.’ And as if these ills were not enough, the imagination of the savage peoples his world with ghosts and demons that can make his life little better than an earthly hell. ‘The Battaks,’ says the same writer, ‘are like lunatics living under the obsession of persecution. In house and village there lurk spirits of every kind, in the field they injure the crops, in the forest they frighten the woodcutter, in the bush they hunt the wanderer. From them come sicknesses, madness, cattle-plague, and famine. They hover about a woman in child-bearing, seeking for the young child’s life; of nights they swarm round the houses, and spy through the openings upon their helpless victims. Mightier spirits visit the villages, spreading epidemics. Even the dead friend or brother is transformed into an enemy, and his bier and grave become an object of terror.’7 In a world of this kind, with whose actual evils, not to speak of the imaginary evils, man feels himself so little able to cope, it is not unnaturally thought that nothing is so urgently needed as a worldly protector and benefactor. ‘The spirits whom the natives worship,’ writes an African missionary, ‘are not expected to give spiritual blessings, but only to help in temporal distress, to avert illness, to grant victory in war, and to ensure an abundant posterity. To keep possession of their goods and to avert calamity is the sole aim of their religiosity.’8 Under Totemism the purpose of the religious rites has been conceived to be tore-invigorate a species of animals or plants on which the food supply depended, and at the same time to reinforce the vitality of the tribe by renewing and cementing its union with the sacred species.

The peoples of antiquity were subject to visitations of pestilence and famine, as well as to the standing ills that afflict human societies—in particular they were constantly exposed to the hazards and the desolations of war; and under Polytheism the worship of the gods was commonly organised as a department of the public service which reinforced the military arm, and also procured a blessing on the avocations and the arts of peace. In the Vedic hymns the blessings for which application is made to the divine protectors and patrons are chiefly cows, rain, sons, and victory over the dark-skinned aborigines, with frustration of the designs of the capricious and malignant spirits. Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian kings set the highest store on the value of the divine alliance which gave them the victory and enriched them with provinces and spoils. No people believed more firmly than the old Romans in the necessity of enlisting the aid of the gods in war; and even in the later rationalistic age there were those who saw in the might and the wealth of the Empire the reward of the piety of their forefathers, and who lamented that war was now carried on in sole reliance on valour and skill, and with neglect of the omens. The religion of the ancient Germans, according to Tacitus, had some elevated features; but they also believed that their gods shared their interest in their campaigns, and they anxiously observed the neighing of the sacred horses, with a view to getting assistance for the deliberations of the council of war. When with the advent of Christianity the question was raised as to which was the true religion, it was commonly thought that the criterion was the extent to which a deity could be depended on for succour and support in the evil day. Chlodwig, it is reported, put the Christian gospel to the proof by commending himself to Christ in the crisis of a battle, and when he got the victory he accepted baptism, and brought his Franks along with him into the fold of the Catholic Church. The Scandinavians clung long and obstinately to their Paganism; and even when the Norwegian kings became convinced that the good name as well as the higher interests of the realm required them to embrace Christianity, there were those of their subjects who said that Thor had served them well in the past in fighting and fishing, and that they saw no reason to desert him for an untried patron. No doubt also they had another prejudice, as even in the Dark Ages it needed some ingenuity to combine piracy as a livelihood with a profession of faith in Christ.

When religion has been deemed to be primarily the concern of the group, it has still been common for the individual to make application for private benefits to the divine powers. In the animistic form of religion, the fetish and the charm may serve quite private uses. Polytheism was largely exploited in the interests of a self-regarding individualism. It was, indeed, one of the attractions of Polytheism that it had its gods and goddesses who presided over different departments of human life and labour; for the individual was thus encouraged to think himself assured of expert assistance in his perilous experiences and in his important undertakings. The popular religion of Greece and Rome consisted in large part in applications to appropriate divinities for good health, travelling mercies, and success in business. The gods specially revered by the Gauls, Caesar informs us, were those who presided over the three great departments of war, medicine, and commerce. At the polytheistic stage, also, the claims of the individual were recognised by a sanguine development of the idea of a future state. Belief in survival after death has prevailed in all periods, but in the later stages of Polytheism this notion was generally enriched by the hope of a blissful paradise. In general, also, the future salvation was conceived on the same lines as that which was coveted for the present life. Some thought of it as a land where man would resume the work of the hunter, the shepherd or the peasant; while the martial Aryans, from the Himalayas to the North Sea, loved to dwell on the security that came after the storm and the danger, and on the feast and the song of the banqueting-hall that compensated for the privations of the earthly life.

The theory that the chief end of religion was to advance and safeguard worldly prosperity was open to serious criticism, and a variety of factors conspired to shake the belief and to dispose the mind to a higher conception of the content of salvation. The expectations of protection and of success in worldly undertakings were as often disappointed as they were fulfilled. Moreover, with the progress of civilisation it came to be thought by some that there were better things than worldly prosperity. And as it was axiomatic that, whatever might be the precise content of man’s highest good, religion was the means by which it was to be won and kept, it was readily believed by the finer spirits that the things for which application was most fitly made to the Divine Being were those that make up the inward wealth of the soul. And yet again, if there be, as has been held, a Godward impulse in man, there must have been those in all ages who felt that the greatest of God’s gifts was God Himself, and who were moved thereby to seek communion with God and likeness to God. There is evidence of some deeper aspirations in the Babylonian penitential psalms and in certain of the Vedic hymns. In particular, the Greek mysteries are evidence that there were those who were dissatisfied with the mundane undertakings of the popular Polytheism, and who looked for a salvation that consisted in a vital union with the divine.

II

The great pantheistic faiths, Brahmanism and Buddhism, presupposed that man is by nature in a state of dire distress, and they promised a corresponding salvation. The practical aim was put in the forefront of the Buddhistic system, which was expounded under the same heads that have been used in setting forth the Christian gospel—viz., the disease, its cause, the remedy and the application of the remedy. The foundations of both systems were laid in a pessimistic estimate of the natural estate of man. For the Brahmanist the world was an illusion, and its prized possessions were worthless. In the first of the four noble truths Buddha gave his judgment that human life is nothing less than a welter of misery. ‘Birth is sorrowful, growth, decay, illness, death—all are sorrowful; separation from what we love, hating what cannot be avoided, craving for what cannot be attained, are sorrowful.’9 There was not even the consolation that if a man’s days were evil they were at least few. For the doctrine of transmigration which dominated the thinking of the post-Vedic period made a human life to appear as a mere fragment of a prolonged existence, stretching before and after, which might be even more crowded at every stage with labour and sorrow, and in which, under the law of retribution, it was possible to descend to ever lower depths of misery and degradation.

For pious Indian thinkers the mundane eudaemonism of the polytheistic period was no gospel. It was agreed that salvation consists, not in the possession of earthly goods, but in the detachment of the soul from the things of sense and time. The principle that through religion man gains the victory over the world was given a new turn, and it was held to make him master of the world in the sense that he needed neither to covet its treasures nor to cower before its terrors. He has realised the illusion and nothingness of all earthly things, and what then should he desire or fear? From of old the Brahman, after he had been enlightened, had no desire for children or possessions. ‘What can he wish for who possesses all things?’ Nor has he anything to fear, for he knows himself one with God, and ‘fear arises from a second only.’10 The Buddhistic attitude was the same—as illustrated in the life of the founder, who renounced all the goods of this world, and went forth into the wilderness, if so be that by meditation and fasting he might win a better inheritance. Contempt for the natural blessings of life was even carried with unflinching consistency to the point of despising the boon of life itself. While nature working through the instinct of self-preservation persuades the ordinary man, equally with the beast of the field, that life is to be defended as the most valuable of possessions, and while the normal inclination of piety is to thank God for being, even when it is divorced from well-being, the strange thing was seen in India that saints and sages, and even many of the multitude, came to think that not to be was better than to be, and that the true Saviour was he who could show the way of escape from the inextricable and intolerable maze of conscious existence.

In this weary and heavy-laden plight, with its still more oppressive outlook, it might well seem that the only adequate gospel was the promise of rest of soul. It was because the holy sages promised rest that Gautama renounced his title to worldly power and glory, and even the love of wife and child, and it was because he did not find it through the Brahmanical way of the mortification of the flesh that he came to proclaim what he deemed a more efficacious gospel. The Nirvana which he promised was not fully explained, but it was at least made clear that it is attainable here below, and that its essence is peace. In replying to a question touching the supreme good he ended with the declaration:

The realisation of Nirvana,

This is the greatest blessing.

Beneath the stroke of life’s changes

The mind that shaketh not,

Without grief or passion, and secure,

This is the greatest blessing.11

The fundamental difference between the two systems might be said to be that Brahmanism promised rest through godliness, Buddhism through selflessness. The Brahmanist taught that the way to repose was through union with God. Knowing himself one with God, he felt that he rose superior to the sufferings and the conflicts of time, and could hope to fall into a dreamless and eternal sleep in the embrace of the Infinite. ‘He whose heart is not agitated in the midst of calamities,’ says the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘who has no longing for pleasures and from whom the feelings of affection, fear and wrath have departed, he is called a sage of steady mind. His mind is steady who, being without attachments, feels no exultation and no aversion on encountering the various agreeable and disagreeable things of this world. A man’s mind is steady when he withdraws his senses from all objects of sense as the tortoise withdraws its limbs from all sides. Objects of sense draw back from a person who is abstinent, not so the taste of these objects. But even the taste departs from him when he has seen the Supreme.’12 Gautama, on the other hand, had no appreciation of the religious values, either as elements of the supreme good or as a means of achieving peace. The Buddhistic system of thought recognised a moral order of the world, but there was no provision for communion with the divine until the disciple sought to supply the want by entering into relations with the deified Buddha himself. The main stress was laid on moral values, and it might even appear that religion was identified with morality, and so ceased to have the character of a salvation. ‘To cease from all wrongdoing,’ so runs a famous text, ‘to get virtue, to cleanse one’s own heart, this is the religion of the Buddhas.’ The detailed list of the ‘greatest blessings’ includes right desires in the heart, almsgiving, righteousness of life, reverence, contentment, longsuffering, meekness, self-restraint and purity.13 And there can be little doubt that there were those who deemed virtue to be the whole of religion, and its own reward. As there were Brahmanists to whom God was an end in Himself, and in no wise a means to finite ends, so there were doubtless Buddhists for whom the ethical values were themselves the highest good. But the system did not make of virtue its direct aim: rather may it be said to have taken the virtues under its wing because they fitted in with the more general aim of the extinction of desire—the argument being that as desire was the root of misery, so with the conquest and suppression of all desire misery would be replaced by peace of soul. On this principle thirst or craving was condemned irrespectively of the distinction between higher and lower desires and between the lawful and the unlawful; and while in some situations this worked out in the ethical forms of humility and service, it could also work out in the sub-ethical and anti-ethical forms of an impoverished, solitary and useless existence; for if in the name of selflessness the principle dictated the forgiveness of injuries, and the works of charity, it no less discountenanced the formation of domestic ties, and the desire to have the powers and the opportunities of service. And in solving the earthly problem of where rest may be found, it was believed that the problem of eternal deliverance was also solved. The attainment of repose through the extinction of desire was deemed to be the foretaste and pledge of a final deliverance, when ‘the Maker of the tabernacle shall not make up the tabernacle again, but all the rafters shall be broken and the ridge pole sundered.’14

The extraordinary hold which Brahmanism and Buddhism took of the Asiatic peoples, and which has been maintained during so many centuries, is partly explained by the fact that the promise of rest makes a constant, and in special circumstances an irresistible appeal to the human being. That this gospel had for Asia a peculiar fascination may have been due to the temper of the masses of its population, and to conditions which in certain periods made existence as barren of hope as it was of comfort and security. It is significant that while the Indian Aryans in the period of their youthful energy had rejoiced in the Vedic promises of abounding life and prosperity, when they grew weary under the burden and heat of the oriental day they came under the spell of the gospel of repose. It is therefore easy to overrate the advance which was made when the theory that religion is the means of worldly prosperity was replaced by the theory that its office is to give peace of soul. For it might happen that, to adapt the phrase of Tacitus, they made a desert of the soul and called it peace. Repose may be the index of very different types of character, and the by-product of very different activities. It may be akin either to the peace of the saint and the sage, or to the placidity of the cow and the slumber of the tired horse. The pursuit of rest may be every whit as selfish as, and may entail even more injury to others than, the pursuit of wealth, and may have its roots in sheer indolence and cowardice. There is a higher moral ideal than that in which a man fears to possess wife and child, or to take part in the business of the world, lest thereby he should endanger his peace of mind. But in justice it has to be added that the higher ideal was pursued by many who pointed to the Buddha himself as their example, of whom it was told that when he had earned his release he returned once more to labour and suffer on earth because of love to man.

It may be further taken to be certain that religions which played the part that these have done in the spiritual history of the race must have had better credentials than that they fell in with the dispirited and despondent mood. Their power was rooted in elements of religious and ethical truth that were embodied in the gospels which they proclaimed. The Brahmanical principle which has been formulated as ‘through godliness to peace’ is a religious truth of the very highest importance; and it is quite credible from the theistic point of view that a man might attain to actual communion with God, and thus be made partaker in a measure of the peace which flows from God, even if his thoughts about God were steeped in ignorance and error. It is not a necessary condition of receiving good at the hand of a father or a mother that a child should know much more than that they exist and are well-disposed; and the same doubtless holds, up to a certain point, of the relations of the Father of Spirits with those of His children who earnestly seek Him and put their trust in Him. Buddhism, in its turn, was based on a maxim which is one of the most important and assured truths of ethical experience—to wit, that the self-centred life is fruitful in misery, and that a man is on the way to find happiness when he does not make it his aim, but is only concerned to get the things done which are worth doing and which he finds it his duty to do. It was doubtless because this is a truth which can be verified and is constantly being verified in every life, rather than because it found human existence wholly evil, and held out the prospect of annihilation as the final blessing, that Buddhism attained to the dignity and made the conquests of a universal religion.

The great Indian religions were essentially individualistic and did not promise much to the nation as such. The indirect contribution from the character and the lives of the disciples may even have seemed of doubtful value, since the goods of this world which they dissuaded men from desiring—notably children and material possessions—were those which are vital to the well-being of the State. Buddhism in particular might well be thought to be a menace to the political community; and it was doubtless partly for that reason, partly because its essential irreligion was an offence to a deeply religious people, that it was driven into exile, and had to seek new worlds to conquer. Brahmanism, besides being better equipped as a religion, also did more to satisfy the demand that it should make a contribution to the well-being of the nation. This it sought to do by investing the castes, which included soldiers and peasants, with a divine sanction, and by representing it as a duty, and indeed as a condition of salvation, that a man should labour faithfully and unselfishly in his appointed vocation. And it has to be added that the popular Epics did much to disseminate and commend the ideals of conjugal love, filial piety and friendship.

III

The monotheistic faith inspired and moulded what has been called the doctrine of a plenary salvation. Under Monotheism religion continued to be a combination of provisional pessimism and prepotent optimism. The difference was that the actual condition of man was depicted in even darker colours than before, and that the promise was made of a richer and more comprehensive salvation. For this type of doctrine the chief sources are the Old Testament and New Testament Scriptures. The common feature of the religion of Israel and of Christianity was the judgment that of all the ills of the human lot the chiefest is sin, which is indeed the root of all misery, and that obstinate and unrepented sin inevitably brings multiplying evils and avenging judgments in its train. The sense of sin, which is necessarily superficial in Polytheism, and which Pantheism tends to annul, is native to Monotheism, and it was intensified in an extraordinary degree in the religious thinking of which our Scriptures are the record and deposit. Sin being thus deemed to be the greatest evil, deliverance from sin was conceived as the chief part of salvation. At the same time there is a decided difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament in the conception of the content and the destination of the blessings. The thinking of the Old Testament prophets was chiefly done in terms of the nation, and the salvation which they promised was essentially national well-being. The gospel of the New Testament was primarily addressed to the individual and was preponderantly spiritual.

1. The provisional pessimism of religious thinking was strikingly exemplified in the message of the Old Testament prophets. The people of Israel were no worse than their neighbours—in some respects they were better—but to the prophets, whose standard was the will of the all-Holy God, it seemed that never was wickedness like unto their wickedness. They mourned over the many sins of the people—idolatry and backsliding, covetousness, sins of the flesh and sins against love. Isaiah declared that ‘the whole head is sick and the whole heart faint; from the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and festering sores’ (i. 5, 6). And this being their case, there was a fearful looking-for of doom. ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth,’ said Amos, ‘therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities’ (iii. 2). But beyond and above the vision of judgment there rose the vision of salvation, which was declared to be guaranteed by the loving-kindness and the faithfulness of God.

The prophetic conception of salvation was set forth in the pictures of the Messianic Age, which were chiefly conceived in terms of national life. The highest ideal of kingship would be realised. ‘The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord. With righteousness shall he judge the poor, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain’ (Isa. xi. 2 ff.). At a later stage, with the deeper insight that was gained through affliction, the deliverer was pictured as the suffering servant who purchased redemption for the people through a sacrificial death (Isa. liii.). There would be an ideal aristocracy: every nobleman would be a noble man—an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest (Isa. xxxii. 2). And there would be an ideal Israel—‘the people will be all righteous’ (lx. 21). ‘I will put My law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it, and I will be their God, and they shall be My people’ (Jer. xxxi. 33). And again, ‘I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh, that they may walk in My statutes, and keep Mine ordinances and do them’ (Ezek. xi. 19). Yet another ideal element was the ascription to Israel of the role of the missionary to heathen nations. It was predicted that it would be the glory of Israel to spread abroad true religion, and that thus in Abraham and his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Gen, xii. 3). But while these high things were the essence of the promised salvation, they had their setting of mundane prosperity. ‘All these blessings shall come on thee,’ said the prophetic lawgiver, ‘if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God. Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the young of thy flock. Blessed shall be thy basket and thy kneading-trough. Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in and when thou goest out. The Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thee: they shall come out against thee one way, and shall flee before thee seven ways’ (Deut. xxviii. 2 ff.).

Patriotism and politics, however, even when idealised, do not completely satisfy spiritual aspirations, and in the later period the spokesmen of the Old Testament religion increasingly recognised the title of the individual to a provision suited to his individual wants. In this matter an important contribution was made in the Psalter. The 23rd Psalm represents God as the Shepherd who feeds and leads His sheep, and protects them even in the valley of the shadow of death; the 121st gives the assurance that the Lord shall keep the soul of His servant, and preserve him from all ill; the 103rd gives a comprehensive list of the religious blessings—the forgiveness of iniquities, the healing of diseases, the preservation of life, the crowning with loving-kindness and tender mercy, the renewal of strength. It may be that, in the original intention of the sweet singers of Israel, the sacred lyrics voiced the needs and the hopes of the nation; but at least the individual, and this doubtless from the earliest times, has found that he could appropriate their admonitions and consolations to his private uses. When in the later period the prophets and sages reflected more on the needs of the individual, it was natural to suppose that he was placed under the same dispensation of retributive justice which was recognised in the case of the nations—that, as is said in the first Psalm, the righteous man flourishes like a tree planted by the rivers of water, while the wicked is like the chaff that the wind driveth away. The facts of experience, however, made it impossible to sustain this thesis, and at the later stage immortality was included with growing confidence among the religious blessings. When the collective point of view was predominant it had been possible to neglect the question of the future life—the more so that the subject was in the hands of witches and wizards, whose traffic with spirits was felt to be a social danger; but immortality was the natural corollary of the Old Testament doctrine of God, and it was inevitable that a claim should come to be made on the all-sufficient God for protection against the evil which appears to be the climax and the sum of earthly calamities. It could not continue to be thought credible that the God who took order that the sun should not smite His servant by day nor the moon by night, and who made goodness and mercy to follow him all the days of his life, should leave him to perish under the assault of the last enemy. And so it was proclaimed with growing assurance that he would dwell in God’s house for ever, and that at His right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Psalm xvi. 11).

The teaching of Mohammed had an affinity with that of the Old Testament prophets. The doctrines of Islam, it may be said, were due to a prophetic mind which partly re-discovered, partly appropriated from the Old Testament, the fundamental tenets of ethical Monotheism, but which made compromises, as the prophets did not, with the programme of unregenerate human nature and the requirements of worldly policy. For Mohammed, as for his predecessors, God was the God of nations, who gave to His faithful people the victory over their enemies, and who could be depended on to endow the State with power and prosperity. ‘Those who take other patrons besides God,’ he said, ‘are like the spider which maketh to herself a house, but the weakest of all houses is the house of the spider.’15 His conception of the content of national salvation compares unfavourably with that of Jeremiah and Ezekiel; but, on the other hand, he offered some compensation by giving extraordinary prominence to the doctrine of individual immortality. His description of the proceedings of the Day of Judgment is very impressive. On the other hand, his vision of Hell is on the plane of the materialistic medieval conceptions, and his Heaven has features that the crudest Christian piety has declined to entertain.

2. In the New Testament scheme of salvation, as has been said, the gospel was primarily addressed to the individual. As formerly the nation, so now the individual, was weighed in the balance; and as before, the verdict was a judgment of condemnation and doom. The pessimistic judgment was indeed qualified in the teaching of Jesus. He distinguished between good men and bad, He found much that was good even in the worst of men, even as He found many bright and beautiful things in the world and in the human lot that were a revelation of the loving-kindness of the heavenly Father. To see in the world nothing but a vale of woe and a race of criminals is not in the spirit of the Galilean gospel. But it is still true that Jesus drew a very sombre picture of the condition and the outlook of man; for He taught that men as such are evil, that sin and misery are inseparable even in this world, and that there remains in the world to come the sentence on the impenitent sinner—‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels’ (Matt. xxv. 41). The foundations of the Pauline Theology were laid in the doctrines that the natural state of man is a condition of heinous guilt and deep-seated misery, and that the situation is made desperate by the certainty of righteous Judgment and of merited punishments. In his indictment of human nature the apostle affirmed the total depravity and the spiritual inability of man, and his view of the consequences of sin was that which has been compendiously stated in the Shorter Catechism—that man by the Fall lost communion with God, is under His wrath and curse, and so made liable to all the miseries of this life, to death itself, and to the pains of Hell for ever. In the Johannine writings the judgment was no whit less stern, and the outlook no less dark. ‘The whole world,’ it is written, ‘lieth in the evil one’ (1 John v. 19). ‘Men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil’ (John iii. 19). And this state of sin is even now a state of death (1 John iii. 14), with the fearful looking-for of the second death (Rev. ii. II).

The consentient testimony thus being that man is sorely, nay desperately, in need of a salvation, the New Testament evangel could only be a splendid gospel if it was to be a gospel at all. As a fact, every type of New Testament doctrine puts in the forefront the announcement of a mighty deliverance. Each version has its central and regulative idea, and in each case what is set in the forefront is some aspect of a great salvation. The Synoptic record of the teaching of Jesus proclaims the good news of the advent of the Kingdom of God; the primitive apostolic writers rejoice in the fulfilment of the age-long hopes of Israel and of mankind; St. Paul expounds the gospel of reconciliation and sanctification; the Epistle to the Hebrews glories in the new way of access to God that has been opened up through the perfect priesthood and the perfect sacrifice; and the Johannine writings magnify the salvation whose temporal and eternal blessings are summed up in the boon of eternal life. The content of this salvation is conceived of as essentially spiritual, and there are three benefits which, though they are described in different ways, are proclaimed with unanimity. These benefits are the filial relationship with God, resting on reconciliation and entailing the forgiveness of sins, participation in the life of God or sanctification, and the complementary and completing gift of everlasting life. The Synoptic record includes them among the privileges and the expectations of the members of the Kingdom—who might perhaps rather be called the children of the holy family of which God is the Father and the Head. They have communion with the Father, and receive the forgiveness of their sins; there is a righteousness of the Kingdom which is a gracious gift as well as an arduous task, and it is involved in their sonship that they are heirs, and that it is the Father’s good pleasure to give them the Kingdom (Luke xii. 32). In the Pauline system the main stress is laid on restoration to the favour of God who ‘was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not reckoning unto them their trespasses’ (2 Cor. v. 19). This blessing as appropriated to the individual was described as justification on the ground of the mediation of Christ; and subject to the condition of the boon being claimed by faith, the sinner was accepted by God as righteous, freed from the penalties of sin, and admitted to the full privileges of the sons of God. ‘All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God; being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. iii. 23–24). It may, however, be a question whether Paul, though he put justification in the forefront, did not rather look on this as a means to an end—the end being the development in the soul of a divine life which, beginning in the birth of the new creature, and putting forth the fruits of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance (Gal. v. 22), could grow to the measure in which the soul was filled with all the fulness of God (Eph. iii. 19). And Heaven was indispensable to the plenary salvation. ‘If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most pitiable’ (1 Cor. xv. 19). His conception of Heaven was that it was the consummation of communion and sanctification, with their accompaniments of peace and joy, of which the believer has a foretaste and an earnest in his earthly experience, while there was an additional inheritance, in which he included truth, of things which eye saw not, nor ear heard, neither had entered into the heart of man (1 Cor. ii. 9). The same ideas concerning the content of salvation are set forth in another form in the Johannine type of doctrine. Special stress is laid on the religious relationship, which, presupposing Christ to be the propitiation for sins, takes the intimate form of an inhabitation by the Father, a mystical union with Christ, and the presence of the Paraclete. The fourth Gospel lays special emphasis on the necessity of the sinner entering the sphere of the divine life through a second birth (iii. 3 ff.), while the last discourses of Christ unfold the doctrine of the Spirit as the principle of a progressive sanctification and illumination. The blessing of eternal life was primarily the spiritual condition which consists in union with God and participation in the life of God, but the Johannine idea certainly included everlasting duration as well as divine quality of life (xiv. 2, 3).

While the content of the Christian salvation was thus set forth as preponderantly spiritual, it had also a material and temporal side. It was a vital element of the teaching of Jesus that the happenings of the earthly lot are under the care of a God of Providence to whom a petition is to be made for the daily bread, and who has made known to His children the law that if they seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, all other things, including the needed provision of food and raiment, will be added unto them (Matt. vi. 33). Paul had as firm a faith in the gospel of Providence as in the gospel of Grace, and he adduced proofs from his own life that the pardoned sinner was under a providential dispensation which controlled and guided the circumstances of his earthly lot—not indeed with a view to protect him against all calamities, but to the end that he might not be tried beyond what he was able to bear, that he might continue to grow in grace, and that there might be opened to him new doors of opportunity in the service of God and of His Church. The Apocalyptic School looked for power and glory from the divine government of the world, and cherished the hope of a millennium (Rev. xx. 4).

3. The Christian Church in its main body, and in its chief branches, has held fast to its faith in a gospel which, presupposing that man is by nature under the dominion of sin and that the wages of sin is death, points the way to forgiveness, sanctification, and eternal salvation. In the controversy between Romanism and Protestantism these blessings were taken for granted, and the matter chiefly in dispute was as to the degree in which, and the stages by which, the blessings are to be appropriated. In the later history of Protestantism there have been schools, notably the eighteenth-century Rationalism, which resolved the benefits of Christianity into the salutary effects produced by teaching the doctrine of God and immortality, and by inculcating the principles of the Christian ethic; but every considerable branch of the Church has adhered, even in decadent ages, to the testimony which was received from the fathers—that sinful man is in a state of dire distress, and that his needs are gloriously met in the gospel. For the masses it has always been axiomatic that Christianity is a salvation, and a religion which makes no considerable pretensions so to be has been looked on as salt that had lost its savour. At the same time it is doubtful if the multitude has ever greatly appreciated the more spiritual elements of Christianity. In the older period the blessings chiefly consisted for the popular mind in escaping Hell, passing easily through Purgatory, and winning Heaven, and also in providential dispensations which could be relied on for the protection and prosperity of towns, families and individuals; and it is because its faith in both articles has been shaken, while it has not become more fitted to appreciate spiritual promises, that there has been an epidemic of religious indifference in the latter days.

The Christian salvation has also made some provision for the collective subjects. There is indeed a serious ambiguity as to the authentic attitude of Christianity to the national community as such, to the goods of civilisation of which it is the bearer and the guardian, and to the course and the goal of the history of the race. The New Testament was largely influenced by the Apocalyptic view, according to which the kingdoms of this world were provinces of the Kingdom of Darkness, and God was speedily to intervene in judgment, to destroy the existing political and social organisation, and to establish His Kingdom above the clouds or on a re-created earth. That no considerable future on existing lines was expected for the nations might also be inferred from the fact that; in contrast with the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament left it open to hold opposed opinions on questions of vital importance to the State, so that Christians have debated whether monarchy or democracy is of God, whether war is ever lawful, whether marriage is ever dissoluble, and whether a socialistic system would come under the category of robbery or of brotherhood. On the other hand, a positive attitude toward collective life is implied in Christ’s parable of the leaven which presupposes the continuance of the general life of the world, and its gradual permeation by the religious and moral principles of the Kingdom of God. Paul rated highly the services rendered to the world by the Roman Empire, and predicted that it would be maintained as a minister for good at least until the forces of evil had been matured and consolidated for the final conflict (2 Thess. ii. 5 ff.). In truth, the ignorance which Paul confessed when he said that he saw through a glass darkly was illustrated by the original Christian outlook on the course and goal of human history. It has since become clear that the world has been the nursery of ideal values of many kinds which may not be disparaged in the name of the religious values, and that the story is not to be summarily ended as a hopeless experiment and an ignominious failure in a cataclysm of doom. Rather does it seem to be moving towards an issue worthy of the human genius, and of the divine power which set man his tasks and equipped him for their accomplishment. But while the Christian gospel contained no promise of national salvation, it is also true that when it became clear that the world was to last for some time longer, and even to traverse new epochs, it appeared that there were very important Christian contributions to be made towards the enrichment of the life of nations. It is no inconsiderable service that the Christian gospel has moulded individuals who have greatly augmented the moral and intellectual resources of the civil society. Further, while Christianity did not undertake to outline the institutions and arrangements of an ideal commonwealth—which would have been incompatible with the vocation of a universal religion, it had nevertheless principles which were found to be most relevant to the tasks of the State, and to the relations of the peoples with one another. In the Middle Ages considerable success was achieved in imposing upon semi-barbarous peoples a type of civilisation that bore a Christian impress. The Reformed branch of the Protestant Church, as represented by Calvin and Knox, was distinguished by its strong conviction that Christ was the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords; and it earnestly preached to the civil magistrate that he was a vicegerent of God whose duty it was to take order that His will should be done by an earthly legislature and executive even as it is done in Heaven. Since the eighteenth century the political action of the Western peoples has been more and more governed by professedly secular ideals; but in recent times, and not least because of the chaos into which Europe has been plunged by the political wisdom or unwisdom of the world, there has been a deepening belief that, if mankind is even to safeguard the cultural and moral gains of the past, it can only be by the governments making the attempt to put into practice the principles of love, brotherhood and service which are enshrined in the programme of the Kingdom of God.

The collective subject which is most prominent in the New Testament as the recipient of the blessings of salvation is the Christian Church. The Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Jesus was in one point of view a society, and as such it received great promises. In the Pauline system a very prominent place was given to the Church, which, as the true Israel, was conceived to be the heir, in a spiritualised and more glorious form, of the promises that were made-of old to the Jewish nation. The medieval estimate of the benefits of revelation could be summed up as the boon of the divine Institution, which was conceived as a continuation of the Incarnation, as sharing in the prophetic, the priestly, and the kingly of Christ, and as destined, even as it had shared in the fellowship of His suffering, to be a partaker in His glory. It was a possibility that the European situation might have so developed that the peoples would have been organised in a theocratic federation presided over by the Pope, for which the Church would have prescribed its political and social ideals, and regulated its international relations, while it would have had at its disposal the temporal power that was needed to enforce its authority; and it is probable that, if this had been the line of development, there would have been large compensation for the repression of national aspirations and the abridgment of national liberties in the securities that would have been provided for some moralisation of polities and for the limitation and even the cessation of war. It was, however, decreed otherwise—doubtless for the greater good of the Continent; and the Church has had to content itself with the privileges which it possesses as in a peculiar sense the temple of the Holy Spirit, as the special custodian of the means of grace, and as the principal instrument for the advancement of the Kingdom of God on earth.

IV

It has, then, been the most prominent and persistent conception of the function of religion that under the care of, or in alliance with, the Divine Being, man enjoys protection against the worst of the evils by which he is afflicted and menaced, and advances to the possession of the best blessings to which he can aspire. This end has been proclaimed in the authoritative exposition of the great faiths of the world, it has been earnestly defended by the main body of the disciples and by the religious communities, and it has had the endorsement of general human opinion. There has been wide divergence of opinion, as we have seen, as to the content of man’s highest good, but it has been at least generally agreed that it is to be won and kept through the instrumentality of religion. And in claiming to be the means to this high end, religion has the field to itself. It may or may not be held that its claim is justified, but at least it has no rival in its bold undertaking. The activities of the secular order only profess to provide particular and limited goods of which man has only a temporary tenure: there remain evils with which man can cope only partially or not at all—notably sin, sorrow and death, and there are priceless blessings which human service can only bestow in part and cannot guarantee. Such a claim, naturally, has evoked much criticism both in ancient and in modern times, and I conclude with some observations on the chief of these strictures.

The objection taken in the name of religion itself is that the doctrine of salvation reduces God to an instrument for the attainment of personal and private advantages. The aspirations of this type of religiosity, says Fichte, really come to this—‘My will be done, mine only, and that through all eternity, which for that reason will be a blessed eternity; and in consideration thereof let Thy will be done in this brief and painful present.’ ‘A God who is to be the servant of our desires,’ he adds, ‘is invoked to render service which any respectable man would despise. Such a God is an evil God, for if He existed He would be working evil to man instead of good. Those who believe in the wish-fulfilling God are the true Atheists who have made to themselves a pernicious idol. The self-seeking religion is superstition, profanation, irreligion.’16 The writer of the prologue to the Book of Job may be thought to have been of the same opinion, as his view is that the man who serves God because it is profitable does not really reverence the Lord. And undoubtedly when it is the whole of a man’s religion that he demands that God shall be his protector in time and eternity it is difficult to defend it against the charge of being a form of the self-worship which is idolatry. But there is an obvious distinction between the conviction that we must look to God for protection and deliverance in the distress of our natural estate, and the view that God merely exists to be the servant of our desires, and that His claims upon us are to be measured by our interests. The latter position can be emphatically repudiated by those who humbly and gratefully occupy the former. It cannot be made an objection to religion that in it a man seeks salvation at the hand of God, unless it also be made an objection to friendship or family life that they are the springs of a happiness and a well-being which cannot be procured through other channels.

From the ethical point of view it has been objected that the desire for salvation is a form of the self-seeking which is the antithesis of true morality. The good man, it is said, obeys the law because such is his duty, and morality is tainted and degenerates into policy when we are influenced by considerations of personal advantage or by the hope of a reward. It is one of the commonplaces of the Dhammapada and of the Bhagavad-Gita that piety is spoiled when there is any expectation of rewards here or hereafter from the performance of good works; and since the eighteenth century it has been common in the West to depreciate Christian morality as deriving its dynamic from the fear of eternal punishment and the hope of eternal bliss. And it must be admitted that the quest of salvation has often been on precisely the same level of ethical dignity as the measures taken by men in the mundane sphere to protect and advance their interests. In heathenism, as we have seen, religion was in general viewed in this way; and in former times Christianity was very generally regarded as merely the means by which a prudent man effected the insurance of his position, and rounded off a successful life in this world by making a safe provision for the next. But we have seen that, in the higher faiths, and notably in Christianity, the idea of salvation culminated in the conception that the highest blessings are communion with God and the regeneration which has as its marks the renewed will and the loving heart, and that the promised Heaven is the state of perfected bliss because it is first the condition of perfected holiness. And if it be self-seeking to apply to God for help in becoming like to Himself and doing His will, this is a form of self-seeking which is indistinguishable from the loftiest moral aspiration.

It has also been said that the utilitarian aim gravely prejudices the claim of religion to be true. This is the contention which was supported by the famous treatise of Feuerbach on “The Nature of Christianity.” He recognised the essentially practical aim of religion as directed to secure ‘the well-being, the salvation, the blessedness of man’; and from this he drew the inference that man had devised a God or gods, made in his own image, to satisfy his desires.17 The wish, in short, was father to the thought, and the parentage stamped the thoughts an illusion. But it does not at all follow that because the things which man has looked to receive from God are the things which he most highly values, he has therefore no reason to expect them. The fact that religion undertakes to satisfy human wants and to gratify human wishes is a reason why its claims should be very carefully scrutinised, but it still remains a possibility that man is a being of such dignity as to be entitled to the satisfaction of his deepest wants and the fulfilment of his highest wishes, and also to the consolation of believing that, when satisfaction is denied him, it may only be postponed. For the modern mind religion is at once too pessimistic and too optimistic—too pessimistic in its diagnosis and too optimistic in its prognosis; but it often appears that time, and we may hold that eternity, is on the side of optimism. Human history, notwithstanding its manifold failures and disappointments, has shown a large fulfilment of aspirations which once might well seem to be ruled out by the untoward conditions of the terrestrial environment, as well as by the defects of human nature; and there is ground for the faith that a being of the spiritual rank of man will sometime and somewhere attain to his summum bonum—that the power in the universe which has helped to realisation so many elements in the human programme of civilisation and culture has not been deaf to the cry for the satisfaction of the craving for communion with Himself, for power to live up to the moral ideal, and for the immortality which is the condition of moral and spiritual perfection.

Finally, there is the objection that the rich promises of religion have been discredited by the facts of experience. Throughout the ages faith has sung in every language under Heaven:

He will not put my soul to shame,

Nor let my hope be lost.

And yet this, it may be said, is just what has been the everyday occurrence under every religious system. The Old Testament prophets make known to us offers who, while they magnified the God of salvation, contended that God did nothing: ‘Let him make speed,’ they said, ‘and let him hasten his work, that we may see it, and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we may know it’ (Isa. v. 19). Aristophanes in the Birds leaves the impression that the Olympian gods are of no use to mankind, while their service entails very heavy charges in the matter of offerings, and that it would be wiser transfer allegiance to the fowls of the air which have manifest powers both to do good and to do evil. Euripides thought that the gods were great in promises, but chiefly in promises. ‘And Apollo,’ said Menelaus, ‘doth he not ward off thy calamities?’ ‘He is going to do it,’ replied Orestes, ‘as is the way of the gods.’18 The futility of religion was a favourite theme of Lucretius, who shows us the vessel caught in the tempest and the whirlpool, gives us to hear the frantic cries and vows of the crew and passengers, and pictures with a grim satisfaction how, beneath a deaf and pitiless Heaven, they pass to their inevitable doom. In our modern world there are numerous persons who think religion is proved futile because much that it once undertook to accomplish is now done by applied science and done more effectively, while a vastly larger, if more silent, company of men and women have lost their faith in God because of the unanswered prayer that a daughter should be healed of her sickness, or that the head of a son should be covered in the day of battle. As a fact, when we survey the conditions of human life upon this planet, the most natural reading of the situation may appear to be that man has been placed under a system of inexorable laws, and that he has been left to find out what he can about his world, and to adjust himself to it as best he may, without hope of external guidance or help. He seems to have been dealt with as a son by a father who sends him out into the world to depend on his own efforts, and who is told to expect no further help from home. But there are weighty considerations to be taken into account on the other side. In the first place, it is to be observed that the criticism has been mainly made by or levelled against those who have not risen above the idea that religion is the vehicle of material and temporal benefits. When this ancient and natural point of view is transcended, and the idea is grasped that the salvation of Christianity is a spiritual salvation consisting in union with God and participation in the life of God, it is matter of common experience that the silences, the refusals, and even the worst strokes of Heaven can take on a quite different aspect, and that what was deemed to be a curse is found in the issue to have been transmuted into a blessing. In the second place, when a judgment is pronounced as to the futility of religion in one’s life, the probability is that it is the proverbially foolish judgment on a half-finished work—a judgment which we shall see many reasons for recalling when at life’s close we look back on all the way by which we have been led, and which, if man be the heir of eternity, will doubtless seem doubly foolish when viewed from the vantage-ground of a future state of existence. The decisive question is whether religion accomplishes what it undertakes at its highest in the bestowal of the Spiritual salvation. And in regard to this it must be said that, while there are promises of religion that remain and must remain in the realm of hope, it is matter of experience and of observation that in unnumbered instances it has done what it undertook in the deliverance of a soul from the sense of alienation from God and from the thraldom of sin; and that it has also given such a victory over suffering and sorrow that thanks could be given even for the cross, and that all things—the evil as well as the good—could be declared to work together for good because men had found God and had loved God. And it has to be added that there is a widespread, deep-seated conviction—which is supported by much experience—to the effect that notwithstanding the reign of law there is still a God of Providence who is able to act in and through natural causes as the controller and disposer of all events, and whose guiding purpose is the highest good of the soul that puts its trust in Him.

• 1.

  Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, v.

• 2.

  Nitzsch, Evangelische Dogmatik, 1869, pp. 73 ff.

• 3.

  Grundriss, ³, 1881, p. 13.

• 4.

  The Golden Bough (abridged), p. 20.

• 5.

  Moral Values and the Idea of God, 1918, p. 179.

• 6.

  For a full and instructive analysis of the higher values, see Sorley, op. cit., chap., ii.

• 7.

  Lebehskräfte des Evangeliums, 1908, pp. 104–5.

• 8.

  Reports of the World Missionary Conference, vol. iv., ‘Animism.’

• 9.

  Rhys Davids, Buddhism, 1903, p. 28.

• 10.

  Brih. Upanishad, S.B.E., xv. p. 85.

• 11.

  Quoted from the Mangala Sutta. Rhys Davids, op. cit., p. 127.

• 12.

  S.B.E., viii. p. 50.

• 13.

  Rhys Davids, op. cit., pp. 126, 127.

• 14.

  Dhammapada, chap xii.

• 15.

  Koran, chap. xxix.

• 16.

  Anweisung sum seligen Leben.

• 17.

  Das Wesen des Christenthums, 1903, p. 222.

• 18.

  Orestes, 419, 20.