This is, I think, the most inward conception of life, and the most intrinsic standard of moral worth, that has ever been presented to human thought. When Christ says: "Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in Heaven"; when he bids us pray and fast in secret so that we may be rewarded, not by the applause of men, but by "the Father, which seeth in secret"; when the author of the "Imitation"--in some ways the most Christ-like of all Christians--reminds us that "what each man is in Thine eyes, that he is and no more,"--we are taken as far in the direction of pure inwardness and intrinsic reality as it is possible for men to go who worship and have long worshipped a "personal God." That "the Father in Heaven" whom Christ adored coincides, in the last resort, with Brahma--the all-knowing, all-thinking Self, the all-embracing, all-sustaining Life--is more than probable. But though the inspired teacher, whose thoughts are all poems, may be able to purify and spiritualize the conception of a personal God, the average man is quite sure to debase and externalize it. If we could but listen to the prayers that at any moment were being addressed "in secret to the Father which seeth in secret," we should realize how widely popular thought had departed from a really inward conception of life, and from a really intrinsic standard of moral worth. What is unique in Buddha's scheme of life is that every influence

which might conceivably come between conduct and its consequences is rigidly excluded. God himself--if we are to continue to think and speak about God--"knows not wrath nor pardon." But can we continue to think and speak about so impersonal a God? Buddha must, I think, have asked himself this vital question. A great spiritual life-work is always the outcome of a great renunciation; and it is possible that what Buddha renounced was something dearer than wealth or power, dearer even than wife or child. The austere inwardness of his teaching had its counterpart, as we shall presently see, in a deep silence about what is ultimate and innermost, a silence which he must have imposed upon himself at the beginning of his long ministry, and which he never broke.

Footnotes