time to time, in a specially favoured age, an
Enlightened One and Enlightener, an omniscient and perfect teacher,
visited the world. Of these there had been in former ages
twenty-four, and the followers of Gautama held him to be the
twenty-fifth, but not the last. The application to Gautama of this
title removed him, to the believer, from the ranks of ordinary men,
and was the signal for a constantly increasing exaltation of his
person. In adhering to the Buddha, therefore, the convert is not
bowing to a mere man, but to one in whom a new type of deity is on
the way to be realised. He is a man; there is a record of his human
life, in which he made a great renunciation, abandoning, out of
compassion for men's sufferings, a position of lordly ease for that
of the mendicant. In this way he is a saviour not too exalted for the
pious heart to love and follow. Having found out in his own
experience the way of peace, and opened up that way for others, he is
a pattern and an encouragement as well as a lawgiver to the earnest
soul; and the personal relation which may thus be enjoyed with the
founder is one great secret of the success of the religion. On the
other hand, he is more than a man. The belief grew up very early that
he was not born in the ordinary way, but that his birth had been his
own voluntary act, and that his great renunciation consisted in his
choosing, out of compassion for men, to enter human life and to bear
the burden of its sufferings. In this way a religion which originally
had no gods and no worship began to supply itself with these. Some
scholars hold that it was among the lay community, among men not
thoroughly initiated into Buddhist thought, and failing to find in
the new faith what their former religions had afforded, that the
deification of the Buddha and the worship of him began; it may
certainly be doubted whether the religion could have lived long or
spread far if these deficiencies had not been early supplied.

2. The Doctrine.--The life of the founder gives us the key to his
doctrine. We see at once that that doctrine was not negative but
positive and constructive. Neither was it socially of a revolutionary
character, nor did it deny any part of the existing religion. We
never read that Gautama's teaching was assailed by the Brahmans as
unsound; it was centuries after his death that antagonism broke out
between the order and the upholders of other systems. Nor again did
the teaching put forwa