rtal themselves? We recognize them as
subject to our will; they are, then, not the I.

As a man, he taught, becomes conscious that he himself is something
distinct from his body, so, if he reflect and ponder, he will come to
see that in like manner his appetites, ambitions, hopes, are really
extrinsic to the spirit proper. Neither heart nor head is truly the man,
for he is conscious of something that stands behind both. Behind desire,
behind even the will, lies the soul, the same for all men, one with the
soul of the universe. When he has once realized this eternal truth,
the man has entered Nirvana. For Nirvana is not an absorption of the
individual soul into the soul of all things, since the one has always
been a part of the other. Still less is it utter annihilation. It is
simply the recognition of the eternal oneness of the two, back through
an everlasting past on through an everlasting future.

Such is the belief which the Japanese adopted, and which they profess
to-day. Such to them is to be the dawn of death's to-morrow; a blessed
impersonal immortality, in which all sense of self, illusion that it
is, shall itself have ceased to be; a long dreamless sleep, a beatified
rest, which no awakening shall ever disturb.

Among such a people personal Christianity converts but few. They accept
our material civilization, but they reject our creeds. To preach a
prolongation of life appears to them like preaching an extension of
sorrow. At most, Christianity succeeds only in making them doubters of
what lies beyond this life. But though professing agnosticism while they
live, they turn, when the shadows of death's night come on, to the bosom
of that faith which teaches that, whatever may have been one's earthly
share of happiness, "'tis something better not to be."

Strange it seems at first that those who have looked so long to the
rising sun for inspiration should be they who live only in a sort of
lethargy of life, while those who for so many centuries have turned
their faces steadily to the fading glory of the sunset should be the
ones who have embodied the spirit of progress of the world. Perhaps the
light, by its very rising, checks the desire to pursue; in its setting
it lures one on to follow.

Though this religion of impersonality is not their child, it is their
choice. They embraced it with the rest that India taught them, centuries
ago. But though just as eager to learn of us now as of India then,
Christianit