speak in the language of
technical theology, Buddhism is a doctrine of works, and Christianity of
grace. That which God gives all men may receive, and be united by this
community of grace in one fellowship. But the results attained by effort
alone, divide men; because some do more and receive more than others. The
saint attained Buddha, but that was because of his superhuman efforts and
sacrifices; it does not encourage others to hope for the same result.

We see, then, that here, as elsewhere, the superiority of Christianity is
to be found in its quantity, in its fulness of life. It touches Buddhism
at all its good points, in all its truths. It accepts the Buddhistic
doctrine of rewards and punishments, of law, progress, self-denial,
self-control, humanity, charity, equality of man with man, and pity for
human sorrow; but to all this it adds--how much more! It fills up the
dreary void of Buddhism with a living God; with a life of God in man's
soul, a heaven here as well as hereafter. It gives us, in addition to the
struggle of the soul to find God, a God coming down to find the soul. It
gives a divine as real as the human, an infinite as solid as the finite.
And this it does, not by a system of thought, but by a fountain and stream
of life. If all Christian works, the New Testament included, were
destroyed, we should lose a vast deal no doubt; but we should not lose
Christianity; for that is not a book, but a life. Out of that stream of
life would be again developed the conception of Christianity, as a thought
and a belief. We should be like the people living on the banks of the
Nile, ignorant for five thousand years of its sources; not knowing whence
its beneficent inundations were derived; not knowing by what miracle its
great stream could flow on and on amid the intense heats, where no rain
falls, and fed during a course of twelve hundred miles by no single
affluent, yet not absorbed in the sand, nor evaporated by the ever-burning
sun. But though ignorant of its source, they know it has a source, and can
enjoy all its benefits and blessings. So Christianity is a full river of
life, containing truths apparently the most antagonistic, filling the soul
and heart of man and the social state of nations with its impulses and
its ideas. We should lose much in losing our positive knowledge of its
history; but if all the books were gone, the tablets of the human heart
would remain, and on these would be written the everlasting