"If Buddhists admit neither judge nor creator," says Professor de la Vallee Poussin, "at least they recognise a sovereign and infallible justice--a justice of wonderful insight and adaptability, however mechanically it acts... In my opinion it is a calumny to accuse Buddhists of atheism: they have, at any rate, taken full cognisance of one of the aspects of the divine." [**]

Gautama believed above all things in a moral order, which, if it is inexorable, is also too righteous to yield to sacrificial bribes:

"Not in the sky, nor in mid-ocean, nor in mountain-cave, can one find sanctuary from his sin... Often do men in terror seek sanctuary in mountains and in jungles, by sacred groves or trees: in them there is no safe sanctuary." (Dhammapada, 127, 188-9.)

So too the Psalmist cries, "Whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there: if I go down to hell, Thou art there also."

Like the Hebrew prophet, too, he strikes a note of strenuous endeavour, of profound dissatisfaction with the actual, and of aspiration after the ideal: unlike the Hebrew and the Christian, he sees in the actual no promise of the ideal. His "way of salvation" is therefore monastic; men are to leave the world if they would escape suffering and be truly happy: the layman may one day attain the far-off goal,

but for him remains a long and weary pilgrimage, many revolutions of the wheel of existence.

It is to Bhikkhus then that these stanzas are in the main addressed. They are comments made by the Teacher to his disciples as occasion arose; and to study them in a sympathetic spirit we of the West must for a time forget our impatience with "cloistered virtue." The saintly life in the world is no doubt a truer ideal than the saintly life out of it, yet saintliness of any type is not to be despised.

The Buddhist holds that in contemplative activity a man may best serve the world: is it not true that "we need reservoirs of every kind of excellence"? We read in the Dhammapada of the fragrance of holy deeds which pervades the high heavens, and of the light that such a life may cast athwart a dark world. The "religious" is more to be envied than kings or even gods, and more fruitful.

"Good is kingship of the earth;
Good attaining heavenly birth:
World-conquest's good, but better far
The fruits of true conversion are."
(Dhammapada, 178.)

These fruits are "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control" (cf. 261); self-culture is in the end the truest benevolence, says the Buddhist, and the deepest wisdom. That "wisdom" of which we shall hear so much in the following