shall guard your
hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus."--Phil. iv. 7.

One of the best tests of the value of a religion, and of the degree of
the truth enshrined therein, is found in the nature and permanence of
the peace which it imparts. For it is a fact that all religions, or
almost all, and especially those which have taken a wide grasp of the
hearts and minds of men, profess to bring peace to the worshipper.

The Roman Church, with its history unparalleled alike for saintliness
or sin, with its offers to resolve all doubts and to forgive all
iniquities, affords a haven and anchorage for those whose bark has been
torn by the stormy winds of private judgment. It is not one or two who
have been brought within her pale in search of peace; and, indeed, the
bosom of Mother Church would be an attractive resting-place, if it did
not strike us on the other hand as being too much like the effort of
one baby to carry another of its own size.

What is true of the Roman Church is true of the religion which has
prevailed even more widely amongst the human race; if we ask the
Buddhist teachers what is offered to the inquiring soul in their sacred
books, or what is revealed as possible in the experience of those men
amongst them who have made the greatest progress in mind-and-spirit
lore, they would talk to you of Nirvana, or, as I think it was
understood by them at the first, the extinction of the individual, even
as a candle-flame is blown out. And however perverted their belief may
have become, they seem in early days to have contemplated a real
destruction of self,--the flame of self-love and self-life being so put
out that it should never more be a flame, and should not long be a
spark. For instance, their writings tell us such things as follow:--

"To him who has finished the path and passed beyond sorrow, who has
freed himself on every side, and thrown away all fetters, there is no
more fever of grief." "Such an one remains like the broad earth
unvexed; like the pillar of the city gate, unmoved; like a pellucid
lake, unruffled."

"Tranquil is the mind, tranquil the words and the deeds, of him who is
thus set at rest and made free by wisdom." "The heart, scrupulously
avoiding all idle dissipation, diligently applying itself to the holy
law of Buddha, letting go all lust, and consequent disappointment,
fixed and unchangeable, enters on Nirvana."

And so in many other features we may trace the doctrine of inw