erving its connexion with Brahmanism, than we could
afford to omit all mention of the Jewish Law and of Jewish Pharisaism, in
speaking of the liberation wrought by our Lord Jesus Christ. The work and
doctrine of Gautama Buddha,--with their mean between an ascetic severity,
on the one hand, and a licentious self-indulgence on the other--their
disregard of caste distinctions--their rejection of burdensome and
profitless traditions--may be said to bear to the heavy yoke of Brahmanism
a relation not dissimilar to that which freedom has to bondage. Laying
hold of that which was ready to his hand, if so be he might mould and
purify it, Buddha was a liberator and reformer in respect to what had gone
before. Let us take, for example, the doctrine of metempsychosis, or, as
it is commonly called, the "transmigration of souls." No doubt, there is a
great deal connected with this doctrine in the Buddhist books that cannot
but appear to us puerile and shocking; but still, we do not well, we do
not justly, if, as do so many, we fasten such strange fancies on Buddha,
or on Buddhism, as though it were from these that they sprang. So far from
Sakya-muni being the originator of the theory of transmigration, a belief
in it had, for centuries previously, been almost universal throughout the
East; and his doctrine of Nirvana supplied an antidote to the belief in a
practically interminable series of metempsychoses current at the time.
With the theory of transmigration accepted on all sides, Buddha seems to
have made use of it to the extent that he did, as affording a convenient
solution of the difficulty presented by the unequal distribution of
happiness in this life, and the absence of any satisfactory exercise of
justice in the way of reward or punishment.

That the doctrine of metempsychosis should have been applied by Buddhists
to their great Master himself, is only what we should expect to find.
Gautama is accredited by Buddhists with some five hundred previous
existences, in the course of which he passed through numerous stages of
vegetable, animal and human life, until at length he attained to the
highest degree of manhood. Throughout the changing circumstances of his
being, he is said to have exhibited a transcendent and ever-increasing
unselfishness and charity, which culminated in his freely giving himself
to be re-born as Buddha for the world's deliverance. And it is this
belief, probably, which has been the most potent factor in ex