It is only when we come to take a bird's-eye view of these two great religions, which have exercised so enormous and so abiding an influence over the human race, and when clearness of vision is unobscured by numberless petty details and dogmas, that we can perceive the factors common to both which have given them their present stability and strength.
No religion, no system of morals, no philosophy, can be secure unless they rest upon the groundwork of universal truth and necessity; and it is certain that, if Christianity and Buddhism did not possess these supports, they would not now be what they actually are—the ruling forces to millions of human beings.
It has been said with much truth that the daily life of an ordinary man is a continual round of intoxication. Some form or other of inebriating excitement seems absolutely necessary to him, if he is to escape from the Slough of Despond of ennui and all its evil consequences. The remark is equally true of the human race as a whole. It cannot survive, apparently, without constant stimuli to urge and goad it forward. Were such stimuli wanting from time to time, man would probably degenerate, and cease to show that love of progress and activity which is so essential to his existence as man. Consequently, we note, looking back through the vista of history which lies open to our view, the periodical appearance of some great religious reformer, whose task it is to infuse new zeal and strength into the flagging energies of his fellow-creatures. Gotama, Jesus, Savonarola, General Booth, are all greater or lesser instances in point; have all worked upon the same basic conception, however different the condition of their times may have required the superficial doctrines of their various creeds to be.
Some—Jesus and Gotama, and possibly Mahomed—worked with the full cognizance of the task before them; others, who have not been gifted with so large a measure of divine insight, have wrought and lived for the same purpose, blindly, and unconscious of the complete significance of their action.
But, it may be asked, if Jesus and Gotama were gnomic, how comes it that the Buddhism and Christianity of to-day are so radically different in their outward manifestations? To answer this question we have merely to take a broad glance at history.
At the time of the advent of Gotama the people of India were in possession of a civilization remarkable in many respects, but most remarkable, perhaps, in the freedom and latitude of thought prevalent. It is difficult for many who have been brought up within the contracted influences of those who regard all alien religions and non-Christian countries as so many black spots on the pages of history and on the maps of the world, and who have been surrounded in their youth by the innumerable restrictions placed upon all speculative propensities, to realize that, at the time when they were mere cave-dwellers and unclothed sojourners with the beasts of the field, a great and lofty civilization was existent in what they would possibly consider a barbarous corner of the globe, and that a people there held dominion whose chief intellectual pastime was to range over the vast domains of speculative thought and all the interminable mysteries of life. The Indian has been a philosopher by birth and breeding from time immemorial; and only among a race of philosophers could such a religion as Buddhism, with its sudden iconoclasm, have been preached with so little opposition, and have taken root so rapidly, when we come to consider the strong hold the Brahmanical ceremonial had upon the people at that time.
With the inception of Christianity, however, the case was very different. At the birth of Jesus the inhabitants of Palestine, with the exception of the Essenes, were sunk low in the mire of bigotry, prejudice, and priestly domination. The mind of the people was less philosophically prepared to grasp a broad and exalted creed such as essential Christianity; it required dogmas more definite, doctrines more easily comprehended; and Jesus had perforce to mould his utterances to the temperament and mental capacity of the people among whom he preached.
To the east of the Holy Land was India, with its refined and more perfect civilization; to the west, Central Europe, with its savage and ignorant tribes, worshippers of trees, and in servitude to many superstitious practices and customs. Christianity, with its immense potential resources, its innate power for good, required some outlet for its activities; and, as was only natural, it spread in the direction where a pure and sublime religion was most needed, and experienced little difficulty in eventually conquering the savage intellect of Central Europe. Becoming appropriated by men who, living in the far North, depended for their very life upon a ceaseless struggle with adverse circumstances, it gradually lost the softening and refining influences which are so characteristic of the Oriental temperament, and became the vehicle for the passions and ambitions of a race more brutal and more unsympathetic than that among which it took its rise.
And to what an extent has this religion of Christ, the evangel of peace and goodwill, been since prostituted! The mistaken—though, no doubt, well-intended—dogmas formulated by the Holy Catholic Church proved to be, in their short-sightedness and complete lack of insight into human nature, a prolific source of degeneration, bigotry, persecution, ignorance, immorality, and extreme ecclesiastical tyranny in the Dark Ages. The rigid and narrow doctrines inculcated by the Puritans have been almost as fruitful a cause of moral perversion and reckless narrow-mindedness. To-day it must be acknowledged that we have outgrown the gross and debasing Christianity of those mediæval times; but many of us are still fast chained in the shackles of prejudice and intolerance, with all their concomitant delusions and hypocrisies.