morally, one of the most important. Perhaps the ethical value of this teaching has never yet been fairly estimated by any Western thinker. How much of human unhappiness has been caused, directly and indirectly, by opposite beliefs,--by the delusion of stability,--by the delusion that distinctions of character, condition, class, creed, are settled by immutable law,--and the delusion of a changeless, immortal, sentient soul, destined, by divine caprice, to eternities of bliss or eternities of fire! Doubtless the ideas of a deity moved by everlasting hate,--of soul as a permanent, changeless entity destined to changeless states,--of sin as unatonable and of penalty as never-ending,--were not without value in former savage stages of social development. But in the course of our future evolution they must be utterly got rid of; and it may be hoped that the contact of Western with Oriental thought will have for one happy result the acceleration of their decay. While even the feelings which they have developed linger with us, there can be no true spirit of tolerance, no sense of human brotherhood, no wakening of universal love.

Buddhism, on the other hand, recognizing no permanency, no finite stabilities, no distinctions of character or class or race, except as passing phenomena,--nay, no difference even between gods and men,--has been essentially the religion of tolerance. Demon and angel are but varying manifestations of the same Karma;--hell and heaven mere temporary halting-places upon the journey to eternal peace. For all beings there is but one law,--immutable and divine: the law by which the lowest must rise to the place of the highest,--the law by which the worst must become the best,--the law by which the vilest must become a Buddha. In such a system there is no room for prejudice and for hatred. Ignorance alone is the source of wrong and pain; and all ignorance must finally be dissipated in infinite light through the decomposition of Self.

Certainly while we still try to cling to the old theories of permanent personality, and of a single incarnation only for each individual, we can find no moral meaning in the universe as it exists. Modern knowledge can discover