listen to it, but pay no heed to it. For ordinary men it is best that the active, positive side of virtue should be approached--gradually and naturally--from the side of self-control. Also, it must be remembered that the formulation of a positive moral law tends, especially in an age of ceremonialism, to arrest the development of conscience,--the very faculty which, in the Buddhist scheme of life, there is most need for men to cultivate. When a man does kind and compassionate deeds (let us say), not because his better nature, acting through his moral sense, prompts him to do them, but because he is authoritatively commanded to do them, there is a danger lest the man's moral sense, finding that there was little or no work for it to do, either as a prompter or as a guide, should gradually cease to energize, and the man should at last become entirely dependent for moral guidance on formulated rules and their professional exponents. Obedience to a negative commandment--provided that the commandment is sufficiently broad and simple for the spirit of it to appeal to one--can do no harm to him who obeys, and may do much good, for the discipline of self-control is one of the best of moral tonics. But when the self-control has done its work, when the soul, braced and disciplined, is ready to walk in the path of active virtue, it is in the highest degree desirable that it should be allowed to walk by itself (or with no more guidance than is implicit in the prohibitions which it has obeyed), and that nothing should be done to impair its insight or weaken its will.

There were weighty reasons, then, why Buddha's

ethical teaching should have been mainly negative. There is, however, one positive virtue which is inculcated in all the Buddhist Scriptures--the virtue in which, in its embryonic stage, all other virtues are present in embryo--the virtue in which, in its ideal stage, all other virtues are crowned and consummated--love. Not the impersonal passion of universal love--that would come at the end of the Path, not at the beginning--but the impersonal sentiment of sympathy, with all that it involves,--kindness, gentleness, unselfishness, compassion. That this should have found a prominent place in the Buddhist scheme of life was inevitable, for, when egoism has been subdued, the self is constrained, by the expansive stress of its own inward nature, to find channels for the overflow of its abounding life; and the safest and most accessible channel of overflow is that of sympathy, first with other men and then with every living thing. But the process which is thus initiated--a process of self-realization through self-expansion--will not cease until sympathy has transformed itself into the passion of spiritual love, and the individual life has at once lost and found itself in the Universal Life, which is and has always been its own true self.