To all alike the Dhammapada has a message of warning and encouragement: to the worldling it holds out the promise of a truer wealth and fame (75, 303) and a more blessed family life (204-7, 302); to the warrior it offers a higher "chivalry" (270) and a more heroic contest (103, 104); to the philosopher a deeper wisdom than much speaking (28, 100, 258); to the mystic a purer and more lasting bliss (197-200); to the devotee a more fruitful sacrifice (106 -7); and to the Brahmin a more ennobling service ( section xxvi) and a more compelling authority (73, 74). It is, in fact, possible largely to reconstruct the religious life of Gautama's day from the stanzas of the Dhammapada.

For all classes the Buddha has the same message: the great reality is character; all else are shadows not worth pursuing, for none of them strengthens moral fibre, and all alike are tainted with "desire."

Like Socrates, he saw in himself a physician of the soul, and at times he resorted to surgery to "stab the spirit broad awake," to call men from superstition on the one hand and materialism

on the other. With Epictetus he would have said, "A philosopher's school, my friends, is a surgery, on leaving which you look to have felt, not pleasure but pain."

Men needed above all things a moral tonic; there lies the secret at once of his stoicism and his agnosticism; luxury here, a barren mysticism there--these were sapping men's strength, and all the energy they could command was needed in the fight for character. They must strive and agonise to "cut out desire," to push their way "against the stream," to cross life's stormy "ocean" and reach the haven of peace. And they must do it alone, not trusting to priest, or sacrifice, or the help of Heaven.

For this insistence upon morality to the exclusion of "religion" Gautama is often labelled "atheist." Nothing could be more unfair: agnostic he may have been or seemed to be; but his was no irreligious spirit: the man who scoffs at the "other world" he condemns in uncompromising terms, and Ethics so lofty as this "Way of Virtue" never emanated from any but a reverent spirit. It is one of the puzzles of Psychology that so pure a soul ever stopped short at Ethics; yet we must remember that he was a reformer, that reformers are apt to be one-sided, and that during long and painful years he had suffered at the hands of a false "religiosity"; the iron had entered into his soul.