Chapter V: Part 5

To one driven as he was to the conclusion that existence was a burden rather than a blessing, death, according to the belief in which he had been nurtured, could afford no relief; but hope seemed to dawn for him as he thought of the happy yellow-robed sages who, freed from his horror, were tranquil and dignified, abstracted alike from pleasure and pain. So after a period of irresolution and struggle, in the very prime of his manhood, he stole away from his wife and his new-born child, and cast in his lot with the forest recluses. Having lived some time with them, and having found that their ascetic discipline failed to satisfy his aspirations, he left them, and joined two philosophic Brahmans, who taught him the science of meditation in its lower and higher degrees. Though he had profited so much by their instruction and discipline that he rose in six years from being a disciple to a teacher, he confessed that he had not found by their methods the imperishable and permanent quietude which he coveted. So, abandoning all his disciples, he withdrew into solitude, and plunged into fasting so rigorous that he nearly destroyed himself; then, finding that the secret of deliverance was not thus to be obtained, he returned, amid the contempt of his former companions, to a more genial mode of life. Then, all alone in the jungle, its manifold discomforts, the memories of home, and the fruitlessness of all his endeavours, assailed him with the force of a temptation to desist from the quest; but rallying all his powers for one supreme effort, he eventually, under a banyan-tree at Bohimanda, triumphed—awoke as one before whom all illusion had vanished, and who by no divine illumination, but by his own personal energy, had attained to knowledge of the causes of all things, and had at last become the Buddha, the Enlightened One.

We need have no difficulty in accepting this outline of the man’s spiritual history as substantially correct; and assuming it to be so, we see at once that it is contrasted in every point with the early history of Jesus of Nazareth. In the Indian narrative, _e.g._, we have long and prolix details of the youth and manhood of Gotama; in the Christian Gospels very few incidents, one pregnant saying, two or three words of description, sum up the whole record of Christ’s biography till He appeared before the Baptist. This silence is surely suggestive, for it could not have been the result of ignorance or forgetfulness. “It is silence, where, to a moral certainty,” as is indicated alike by the apocryphal Gospels and the Buddhist legends, “men left to themselves would have used much speech.” In the Gospels the things which we are naturally curious to know are concealed from us, and there is disclosed only the spiritual reality in which Christianity consists. Where He was, how He looked, what He did during these long years of waiting and preparation, the Evangelists have not told us; but they have revealed enough to show what He was. Scenery and circumstances are as nothing, because the life that was revealing itself in them was everything; and of the unfolding of that life, the few and slight but most suggestive touches of the Gospels enable us to form clearer conceptions than we are ever likely to form of Gotama’s from the abundant incidents of the Buddhist story.

Thus while the son of the Indian rajah did not require to keep from himself anything that his heart desired, Jesus of Nazareth in the home of Galilee had to deny Himself, and to endure in the commonest kind of labour a hardness which the Indian youth, in the inertion of his class and race, regarded as part of the curse of existence. Still, Jesus had meat to eat which the other knew not of; He had bread enough and to spare, while the other was perishing of hunger. Rich in poverty, while Gotama was poor in his abundance, Jesus the carpenter appears highly exalted in what the other would have called humiliation. There, while Gotama, having everything which he could desire at his call, had discovered that human life was worse than vanity, Jesus, self-surrendered in faithful service of others, was learning how full of blessedness and how rich in power of blessing the life of any man might be. The angels of nature and providence, by the lilies of the field and the children in the market-place, instructed him in a wisdom which no Indian sage ever dreamed of; and though He saw the wretchedness of this evil world as Gotama never saw it, and felt for the misery of men as Gotama never could feel, He saw what even Buddha the Enlightened never could descry, the face of a Father in Heaven not frowning in wrath but yearning in pity over all. So, instead of repelling, the suffering and evil of the world drew Jesus closer to it, till, finding His grace, not as Gotama found His wisdom, in desire to be delivered from it, but in the depth of His longing to save it, He gave Himself to it and for it, as for a joy that was set before Him.

Again, the enlightenment of Gotama was the result of a painful struggle, first between inclination and duty, and then with great perplexities of duty, but in Christ it was painless and natural, like the growing of the dawn into the day. His pure and at first joyous life unfolded itself like a beautiful morning under the animating impulse of love to God and to all His creatures. As He grew in consciousness of the heaven within, He became more conscious of the disorder without, and more sensible of His isolation in regard to it. As year by year the sense not of the world’s misery but of its guilt increased within Him, there would also increase the longing that it should be taken away. Very early the conviction took possession of Him, that He was not here to win His own way to deliverance, but to be about His Father’s business. Gradually the Father’s business was revealed to Him, and when the preaching of the Baptist had made it clear, without any wrestle like Gotama’s, Christ, ever close to His Father, and ever clear in His duty, set Himself at once to fulfil it.

It is often alleged that the temptation in the wilderness, which marked the close of our Lord’s long period of silent preparation, is an exact parallel to the fasting and temptation which preceded Gotama’s enlightenment at Bohimanda. There is doubtless an external similarity sufficient to arrest our attention, but the internal contrasts disclose experiences of quite different characters. In the light of their respective histories, these occurrences, though often referred to as miraculous, were in reality most natural. They represent experiences of which there could be no witnesses, and which, indescribable in plain words, could only be suggested by a kind of parable. The temptations are recorded not as they were presented to the persons tried, but in the character which they assumed when their drift was discovered and their aim was detected. Both were assailed by suggestions, raising in them a tumult of emotion, which, if unresisted or yielded to, would in Gotama’s case have been equivalent to abandonment of his quest for deliverance for the sake of sensual indulgence offered by Mâra and his daughters, and in the case of Christ, to refusal to live by obedience, to tempting the Holy One of Israel, and to worshipping the splendid majesty of wrong. The temptations were real, assailing the will, seeking to paralyse or to change it; and their force in each case would be in proportion to the depth and purity of the natures assailed. Gotama, though unmistakably a man of high spiritual aspiration, was attacked by sensual visions,[137] which could not possibly have been a temptation to a nature like Christ’s. He had “to repel as evil what to other men would have appeared as ideals of good, and had to turn away from what the noblest of men would have cherished as innocent dreams or splendid chances,”[138] because to His pure eyes they were Satanic temptations. He suffered, being tempted, but His trouble and suffering were caused neither by irresolution, nor vanity, nor fear, but by His own lowly humility and to the sense of the exceeding greatness of His mission.

Gotama, sorely concerned about himself, went apart to fast and meditate and wrestle for his own deliverance, but Christ went apart not to fast—fasting was an unheeded incident in and not the aim of His retirement, and in no perplexity about His own salvation, for that was assured and made the basis of assault,—but that in quiet meditation He might see more clearly the way by which the salvation of God could be brought to mankind. Christ was forced to acknowledge that absolute surrender to His Father’s will in His mission meant absolute antagonism to the world, and He was tried by suggestions as to the mode of prosecuting His mission, all the more seductive that they were confessed to be natural. Might He not, as the Beloved of Heaven, to carry the world along with Him, and to save multitudes from suffering, swerve just a little from His high ideal, and accommodate His ways to suit their prejudices? These temptations in the beginning continued His temptations to the very close of His ministry. Not once, but all His life, as He hungered for the sympathy and trust of those whom He sought to save, was He tempted, as in Capernaum, when many fell away from Him, to “change the stones into bread.” Not once only did He stand on “the battlements of the temple,” nor once only was He offered “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” Again and again was He in peril when He stood high in the opinion of the crowds, and heard them in their Hosanna entreating Him, through His very sympathy with and love for them, to gratify their wishes; yet in every case the temptation was rejected without the slightest wavering the moment it was understood. “Get thee behind me, Satan.” “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” “The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?”

For again, Christ conquered because from the beginning to the closing agony He stood firm rooted in obedience and in submission to the will of a Higher than self; but the Buddhist writers want to impress the very opposite of this upon us in regard to Gotama’s victory. He is said to have conquered Mâra by the force of his own will, and won his way to light by his individual energy alone. After he became Buddha he hesitated whether he would preach the way of deliverance to men, not because, like Moses and the Hebrew prophets, he had no confidence in himself and required the assurance of a divine strength not his own. He had perfect assurance in himself, but he had no confidence at first in the ability of others to comprehend and to follow him in a way so difficult to find and so hard to tread.[139] He asked no deity to help him, for he was greater and wiser than all the gods. In the legends Brahma is said in intercession to have pressed him to preach the way, and moved eventually by no intercession, but simply by his own pity for men lost in the vortices of miserable existence, he went forth in no strength but his own to preach and to teach in a ministry, not of shame and humiliation and death, but one of great exaltation and honour.

This conception colours the narrative of his whole career. In the later scriptures he is designated the Tathâgata (He who has gone or arrived at Nirvana), the very reverse and point-blank contradiction of Christ the Messiah, He who was sent. There was no higher to send him, no wiser to teach. He came in his own name; but Jesus, as one sent by Him into the world, went forth in the name of His Father. Though He made demands upon the faith of the world compared with which the pretensions of Gotama are trivial—for at the highest he only claimed to be Buddha the Enlightened, while Christ spake of Himself as the “Light of the world,”—yet in Christ’s claim there was ever a sense of dependence expressed or implied, as of one who of His own self could do nothing, and who only taught what His Father had showed Him. Both spake with authority, and not as the scribes; both superseded the traditional domination of what was said by men of old times with the emphatic “I say unto you”; but there is a vast difference in the quality of this authority in the two cases. The authority of Buddha sprang from his acknowledged intellectual superiority, but the authority of Jesus sprang from spiritual insight. The deliverances of Buddha were given after the manner of a Socratic dialogue, and he won his converts and vanquished opponents by his dialectic skill.[140] But in all the encounters of Christ with His enemies there was no forcing of their reason to gain His end. His replies and counter questions were brief and direct and incisive; they were like the fiat of a king or the sentence of an unchallengeable judge, from which reason and conscience alike confessed that there could be no appeal.

Certainly in the two ministries was fulfilled a saying of Christ, “I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not; if another shall come in his own name, him will ye receive,” for after a very short period of imperfect success the public career of Gotama became a continuous victorious progress. Disciples, drawn mostly from the highest classes—the Brahmans, the nobles, and the wealthy merchants—flocked round him wherever he appeared. He journeyed followed by admiring crowds, he had only to show himself to impress, and he had only to preach to convince. The most stubborn resistance became fluid under his spell, and those who approached to confute were sure to succumb to his sweet reasonableness. He was supported by powerful rajahs, and those who did not show him proper reverence were punished according to their edicts. He was lodged in parks and gardens and palaces, several of which were gifted to him for the use of his Order. Accessible always to people of all castes, and of every condition, and of both sexes, he received the attention of the courtesan, and shared her feast and accepted her offering,[141] but he always maintained the nobility and purity of an irreproachable character, and wherever he was found it was as the prophet of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come. Rejoicing through his long and honourable ministry, sometimes loath to die, as foreseeing the troubles which would befall his Order after his decease, he at last, when over fourscore years, in a sickness alleged to have been induced by partaking too freely of some rich food, with the quiet dignity and composure of a saint, fell asleep, and was buried with the funeral obsequies which Indians then bestowed on the bodies of their greatest kings.[142]

It would be impossible, in every respect, to find a more absolute contrast to all this than the story of Jesus of Nazareth. If He was popular, it was only for a little, and then only with the masses. The aristocracy and the religious classes stood aloof, and soon entered into a conspiracy to get rid of Him. He had a few disciples among them, like Joseph of Arimathæa, and Nicodemus, and the family at Bethany, but the words of the prophet accurately sum up the narratives of the Gospel, that He was “despised and rejected of men.” To follow Him meant joining in no triumphal procession, but in a struggle against storm and tide which was sure to end in death. Suspected from the first, and speedily denounced, He was watched and tracked and driven from place to place, till at last the toils of the hunters closed successfully around Him, and at the age of thirty-three He was crucified as a malefactor between two robbers on Calvary.

But the grand and crowning distinction between the import and effect of the two ministries emerged at the close. After Gotama died and his body was burned, and his relics had been reverently gathered, and distributed, and enshrined in costly dagobas erected in the various scenes of his labours, there was an end of him. He had gone out into the void, according to his own theory of the hereafter, and, no longer capable of being of use to his disciples, he exhorted them to be “their own refuge, their own law, and to work diligently out their salvation.”[143] But when Jesus had been crucified there was manifestly not an end, but rather a new beginning of His personal influence, a rising in fuller power, a coming again with greater authority. From the very morning of His ministry He took His death into His plan, as the consummation of one stage of His mission, without which His plan would have been a failure. All His teaching centred in His death, as a moral and spiritual necessity in Divine providence. Instead of complaining of it, He pointed to it as the seal of His Messiahship, “the cause for which He was born, the end for which He came into the world,” “the hour” of His glorification. The very setting of crime and passion which His enemies sought to give to the manner of it only made it in His estimation more divine. Instead of evading it He went straight to meet it, when the time had come, as one who had a purpose to fulfil by it. That purpose He announced to be the development of His personal resources, the liberation of the creative energies of His being. As uncrucified He might be weak, as crucified He would be so mighty as to “draw all men unto Him.” The event amply fulfilled the prediction, for shortly after the crucifixion Christ again confronted the world in another form and in far greater power. The followers of Buddha went forth testifying to his law, and they prefaced their preaching by the invariable formula, “Thus have I heard, when the Blessed One lived in ——.” Their mission was simply to recall and declare and expound the system of a master who had been absolutely lost to them, but the apostles of Christ from the very first testified not of a doctrine, but of Christ Himself, as one who having died still lived, was reigning in mightier power, and would be with them always, even to the end of the æon.

For we must bear in mind that Buddha and Christ stand in very contrasted relations to the systems of belief which they each founded. Soon after Buddha’s death, if not before it, the formula of admission into his order began with the phrase, “I take refuge in Buddha,” which consequently has been described by some as the “first article in the Buddhist creed.” We must not for a moment however suppose that this expression is of equal or even of similar significance to our confession, “I believe in Christ.” Gotama in the whole course of his preaching never asked his hearers for faith in himself as essential to their emancipation. All that he demanded was obedience to the law, disposition to enter, and determination to follow the paths which he had discovered. He could not give them Nirvana, nor even bring them to it; he could only tell them the way to it, which he had found, and as he had succeeded so might they by their own individual energy.[144] We are thus not free to explain Buddhism from and by the person of its founder; it is perfectly explicable apart from him, as if he had never lived; but apart from Christ, and without the light thrown upon it by His person, Christianity would be an enigma. Christ from the first demanded faith in Himself as essential to salvation.[145] Belief in what He taught was always subordinated to trust in Himself. Consequently the apostles never said, ‘Observe the precepts; follow the paths, and you will find the way of escape,’ but always “Believe in (_or_ on) the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” They pointed to Him as the sole object of faith and worship, as the only rule and example and inspiration. Their creed, their theology, their ethical code, were not elaborated in systems; they were all comprehended in a Person who required neither apologists nor defenders, but only witnesses who would manifest and declare Him.

This must be borne in mind when we consider the miraculous elements which are common to the presentation, given in both religions, of their respective Authors. The story of Buddha, as we have hitherto followed it, tells of a great renunciation, but of one that can hardly be called unparalleled in the history of religion. He was probably neither the first nor the last noble Indian youth who “for the sake of that supreme goal of the higher life went out from all and every household gain and comfort, to become a houseless wanderer.”[146] But the story as we have it in the Buddhist books is very different.[147] Had any one asked a yellow-robed missionary, about the time when the last Gospel was being written, what he meant by the Buddha, he would have begun by telling of one who, thousands of ages back, in the shining world of the gods, out of pity for the miseries of men, resolved to become a Buddha that he might teach them the way of deliverance, and who through many transformations—in which he was baptized into all experiences, even those of rat and a clod of earth—at last reached the point when, coming down from heaven, and entering, in the form of a white elephant, the side of the wedded wife[148] of a great king,[149] was born as Buddha. He would tell of a mysterious baptism, when two full streams of perfumed water fell from heaven upon him, while all the gods in all the worlds raised in responsive harmony the heavenly song; of a holy sage who descended from heaven to greet him with predictions of his glorious career;[150] of many prodigies displayed by him in his illustrious youth; of his mighty struggle with and victory over Mâra, Lord of all Desires, and of his going forth as a great king, at the urgent request of the great god Brahma, to preach Nirvana and deliver the world.

Then he would tell how when he set “a-rolling the wheel” of the “kingdom of righteousness,”[151] he did so with such effect that not only multitudes of men, but eighty thousand gods and angels, “hearing, each in their own tongue, though the language was that of Magadha,”[152] were by one sermon imbued with saving knowledge and converted; how during his long and holy ministry, by discourses and parables and miracles, he brought countless millions of men and women, and gods and sprites and fairies, to find the right way; how the great devas came to worship or to ask counsel from him;[153] how, inviolable and invincible, there could not be found, either in this world or in the world of the devas, Mâras, Brahmans, “any who could either scatter his thoughts or cleave his heart”;[154] how he was transfigured,[155] and at last, when the time was come, accompanied by a disciple very dear to him, how he lay down like a king between two trees. Then when winds were hushed, and streamlets silenced, and flowers from heaven shed their blossoms over him like rain-drops, and a great earthquake rumbled, and the sun and moon hid their faces, and the great Brahma lamented, rising through light to light he achieved the full Nirvana.[156]

It is not wonderful that Christians who have only read or heard of the statements current as to the remarkable coincidences between the miraculous incidents recorded in the Buddhist legends and the Christian Gospels should be perplexed, and that not a few of those who are anti-Christian in their attitude should have almost jumped to the conclusion that the biographers of the two lives must have known of each other’s works and borrowed each other’s traditions. Examination of the alleged coincidences, however, reveals that there is no occasion for the perplexity in the one case, and no ground for the jubilation in the other. By no honest process of manipulation can we turn the supposed similarities into even probable identities. The incidents illustrate very widely contrasted lives, and enforce dogmas utterly contradictory to each other. If any one is desirous of ascertaining the coincidences which are stated to exist, he will find them clearly set forth and classified by Professor Seydel in his so-called Buddhist Harmony;[157] and if he require any more than his own common sense to guide him to an opinion concerning them, he had better consult the Appendix to Professor Kuenen’s Hibbert Lectures on _National Religions and Universal Religions_, Dr. Kellogg’s _Light of Asia and Light of the World_, and Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter’s article in the _Nineteenth Century_, December 1880, “On the Obligations of the New Testament to Buddhism.” These authorities will confirm the judgment which any unbiassed and intelligent juryman would form, from considering the evidence adduced in support of the theory of borrowing, and from a simple comparison of the alleged parallels themselves, that Buddhism had not the smallest direct influence on the origin of Christianity. So fundamentally unlike are the alleged “similarities” that the hypothesis of the derivation of the contents of the Gospels from Buddhist sources is as ridiculous as would be the supposition that the Venus of Milo was copied from the rude idol or hideous fetich of an aboriginal tribe.[158]

When the missionaries of the two religions first came into actual contact has not yet been ascertained, and the influence of the Christian ideals of self-oblivion upon the most essentially selfish system of salvation ever promulgated to the world has yet to be traced. The conception of self-renunciation which is set forth in the legends may have originated in the memory of the kindness and gentleness and goodness of one whose life was far nobler than his creed, and it may have assumed greater strength and clearness when the teaching of the Gospels came to be reflected upon it. It may or it may not, but of this we may be positively certain, that the writers of the New Testament and the composers of the earliest Buddhist traditions knew positively nothing of each other’s productions. This is a conclusion accepted by the very best authorities on the subject, and it is maintained with the greatest firmness by those of them who discount the miraculous occurrences found in the scriptures of both religions as only the fond fancies which their affectionate disciples gradually wove around the memories of their respective teachers. They hold that working independently of each other, but under similar influences and in similar conditions, it was simply natural that they should have come to adorn with wonders somewhat alike in character the story of two lives so pure and beneficial.

The learned author of the Hibbert Lectures for 1881 has made some very interesting and important suggestions as to the rise of the Buddhist legends, and as he seems to imply a similar growth of the “Christian legend,” it may be advisable to consider both accounts in their relation to the literary sources which profess to authenticate them. Let us assume, therefore, that the Lalita Vistara was actually in circulation about the beginning of the Christian era,[159] and let us take for granted that one of the oldest Suttas,[160] professing to relate a portion of Buddha’s ministry, was extant in the form in which we have it, some three centuries earlier, or a century after Buddha’s death. A comparison of these two productions reveals at once the fact that in the earliest there is no reference to the divinity, pre-existence, or supernatural birth of Buddha, and making allowance for the usual exaggeration of language, that there are very few miraculous incidents recorded in it. It has been asserted that Buddha never professed to work a miracle. Certainly the fragments of his original teaching which survive indicate that he would be the first to repudiate all such as have been ascribed to him. Be that as it may, it is a literary fact that in the supposed earliest books only a few miracles are recorded. We may infer therefore that by the time they were composed his orthodox disciples had not formed those conceptions of his person and mission which their pious descendants later on learned to believe and to proclaim.[161]

The Gospels are not the earliest Christian writings, and not several, but many, “narratives concerning those matters which had been fulfilled or established among” Christians, even as they “delivered them who were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,”[162] were probably in circulation before the Gospels were written. Some of the Epistles of St. Paul also, in all probability, preceded those collections of “the words and deeds of the Lord”; but the substance of the three first Gospels was very early produced, and we may be morally certain that they contain the beliefs which the very first generation of Christians entertained concerning Him. The truth of these beliefs is not now under discussion, but only the fact of them, and the kind of people who were influenced by them. It is averred “that the outward conditions in which Buddhism and Christianity arose were similar, and so were the mental qualities of the disciples of both religions”;[163] but the conditions were most dissimilar in this respect, that Buddhism originated in the dimness of an unhistoric age, and Christianity in an age and land so irradiated by the light of history that we know more clearly what was happening then and there than we do of what occurred in Europe a thousand years after. The mental qualities of the disciples of both religions again seem to have been most unlike. About Ananda and his companions we know really nothing but the names, for they meet us in the Buddhist records as mere lay figures, completely resembling one another, and with no individuality to distinguish them.[164] We may assume, however, that they belonged to one or other of the many sects of Brahmans or Sramans, and if so, that they were dreamy and contemplative men, withdrawn from practical life, and finding in the life of meditation a sphere more congenial to them than the actual world of which they were parts. They appear to have been directly and thoroughly unlike to the very marked personalities represented by the Evangelists and the other apostles of Christ, who were all drawn from practical life to be His followers. They were the very reverse of speculative; they had little imagination and almost no poetry in them; they were very dull of comprehension in regard to truths higher than the few which they inherited, and very incredulous about any unwonted occurrence said to have taken place outside the little circle of their own observation. In their conscientious, matter-of-fact way of looking at things they were the very last men to dream dreams or weave legends around the memory of one whom they revered; and we have their own confession, not of their slowness of apprehension merely, but of their unbelief at first in regard to all supernatural manifestations.

Now while the supernatural only rarely meets us in the most ancient Buddhist productions, where we would naturally have expected it to have predominated, it meets us in the very earliest writings of Christianity, where we would not have expected it at all. Christ to His first disciples and apostles was a miraculous being. The claim formulated in St. John’s Gospel, which is probably the latest book in the New Testament, is that advanced for Christ by St. Paul in his earliest extant letter to the churches. The Christ of St. John is not a new Person, but the same Divine Being of whom St. Paul says, “He being in the form of God” was “found on earth in fashion as a man.” He may have been all wrong as to the ground of his belief; he may have been an epileptic, a visionary, a man subject to trances, whose intense spiritual affinities disqualified him from judging calmly of matters of history; but there is no mistake as to his own belief and that of the other evangelists and writers of the New Testament. The teaching of St. Paul and St. John concerning Christ is set forth in St. Matthew with a clearness which no language can improve upon.[165] St. Mark dwells primarily upon the humanity of Jesus, a most important fact, presenting a historic basis without which Christian truth would have been little more than a mystic speculation; but even in St. Mark that humanity is not described as unfolding under conditions which are merely normal.[166] The life to which he testifies is not just that of Jesus of Nazareth, but of the Christ of God, who speaks with more than human authority. The development which is traceable in the theology of the Epistles is the expansion of the significance of the events recorded in the Gospels. The latest writings may more fully interpret the teaching of the earlier ones, but in them we find no other Gospels, but only anathemas pronounced on those who pretend to have them. In them a larger domain is seen expanding beneath our gaze, but it is visible only in the light of the central figure that meets us in the first. Plainly, therefore, while the earliest Buddhist witnesses account for their master and his teaching in the ordinary ways, and while their successors much later on in their attempts to embellish his portrait have produced quite a different person from the man of whom they first testified, the very earliest Christian writers could not account for Christ in any other way than by regarding Him as a supernatural being, who did not come into the world and did not leave it in the way of all other men. It is possible that they may all have been deluded, but if so, they vouched for their sincerity by their martyrdoms. The delusion, moreover, was at least universally and most consistently maintained, and it is the first instance in the history of mankind where a delusion has produced intellectual activity and expansion so wonderful as to have changed the current of history, and originated the great throbbing ever-enlarging world of Christendom which confronts us now.

Another significant contrast between the two sets of writings is found in the fact that while we can dissociate the miraculous elements from the Buddhist Pitakas without detriment to their other contents, we find it impossible to apply the same process with the like results to the New Testament. No one questions that primitive Buddhism is improved by being freed from the portents which subsequently gathered around it, for primitive Buddhism is an intellectual and moral system, a theory of the universe more likely to be obscured than elucidated by an appeal to the supernatural. Christianity, however, while appealing both to intellect and conscience, does so as the revelation of a life which, as a new thing, might break through all men’s conceptions of what was ordinary or necessary. The first appearance of life on this planet as an unwonted phenomenon would be accompanied by manifestations miraculous to all who only judged by experience of what had already been. So would be the first appearance of man to those who judged of things by what was possible to the actual animal world. That the manifestation of One who had come that men might have life, and have it more abundantly, should be accompanied with phenomena new and strange to mankind might have been expected. Christ, as revealing an ideal of excellence to which things as they are in nature, and men as they now are in society, do not conform, will in truth contradict the present working of both. This at least is the impression inevitably produced by the reading of the New Testament. Its teaching is throughout founded upon, and it would be quite unintelligible without reference to, the supernatural. To dissociate the miraculous portions from the rest of its contents would be not only to mutilate but to destroy it.[167] Not the theological and metaphysical elements only, but even “the ethical, are so interwoven into one fibre with the supernatural in the New Testament that it is impossible to detach them without destroying the whole fabric.”[168] Verily a Gospel without the miracles and all that accounts for them would be a very strange book.

Another very distinctive feature in the New Testament accounts is displayed in the character of the wonders there recorded. Indeed, this distinguishing element is found in all the miraculous narratives of the Bible. If it be true that the ancient writers or redactors of Scripture have employed the legends of other nations to illustrate their works, it must be conceded that they have immensely improved, and made a much better use of them. The story of the creation of the world, of the primeval paradise, and of the deluge, may be only myths common to several nations, but somehow, while all other writers just lose themselves in these myths, the Hebrews alone have laid hold of them to enforce the sublimest views ever formulated in human speech concerning the origin of the world and of man. The narratives of the Old Testament are evidently not constructed to startle the reader with portents, but to disclose the providential dealings of a holy and merciful God with man to enlighten and save him. The Gospels in like manner are not written to record miraculous occurrences, nor are miracles introduced to glorify Christ: they are simply referred to as incidents in His ministry. When we compare the prodigies ascribed to Buddha during the many changes of his pre-existence, or during his ministry, with the miracles of the Gospels, they are like the rough casts in clay or wood made by a rude or childish people contrasted with the perfect productions of nature in the world of animals or of men. They may endure comparison with the portents found in the Apocryphal books, or in the Lives of the Saints, but placed side by side with the Gospel miracles they serve only to illustrate the difference between what is artificial and grotesque, and what is original and natural. There is a marked sobriety in the Gospel accounts totally lacking in the Buddhist legends. The latter serve no other end but to exalt and magnify Buddha,[169] but the Gospel miracles are all founded in some great human necessity which they are intended to supply. The Buddhist marvels are simply produced to startle us, the Christian are recorded as signs to instruct us. What a gulf separates the conception of Buddha leaping high in air amid the sounding of the bells of the heavens and the plaudits of all the gods, just to prove that he was Buddha, from the account of Christ’s refusal to work a miracle to win the adherence of the crowd, or give the sign from heaven to vanquish Sadducean unbelief! The Gospel miracles are few after all, but they all flow from and are in harmony with the original idea of Christ as Messiah which is assumed in all the Gospels. The mighty works done by Him are all such as might be expected to be done in a world like this by the Son of a heavenly Father. The cure of all manner of disease, the exorcism of all the evil spirits that have afflicted humanity, the victory over death, the control of all the forces of nature, were all in the scope of one who came hither to establish the kingdom of God. Christ’s miracles were all signs of man’s present and prophecies of his future relations to all the evils that afflict him. They all remind us of the Divine original ideal that man, perfectly obedient to God, must exercise dominion over His creatures in this world. Man’s present antagonism to nature, and the disorder seen in his own social relations, are alike due to his refusal to merge his will in God’s, and the miracles of our Saviour are all prophecies that when through obedience to or faith in God he shall be restored to holiness, he will find his social and external relations improved, and will regain over nature that spiritual authority which even already the winds and the waves in part recognise and obey.[170]

Again, the New Testament writers claim for Christ what the early disciples of Buddha never dreamed of claiming for their master, and they insist upon their claim, though it is associated with the meanest and apparently most contradictory of elements. It is not the glorification but the humiliation of Christ which constitutes the marvel in the Gospels. It was very natural that the Evangelists should imagine that the angels should sing over the birth of a Saviour, but it was not natural that they should conceive of them singing over a babe in a manger. It was not wonderful, again, for Jews to believe that the coming of their Messiah was divinely announced, but it is very wonderful that they should believe that this annunciation was made to unknown shepherds. It was certainly not in that way their Messiah was expected to come. Had He come in the way they expected, the miracles might naturally have been accounted for which they associated with His coming; but, as matter of fact, it requires the miracle to account for their belief in Him. And so it is all through in the Gospels. That the Messiah should be discovered to be the Son of God need not surprise us, but that the Son of God should be recognised by Jews in the form of a servant, enduring patiently the contradiction of sinners, submitting to trial, to torture, to death on the cross, is one of the greatest marvels in the whole history of religion. This combination of glory and shame was a difficulty in the way of faith, not a help or support of it. The claim, we must remember, was not advanced for Christ by the Evangelists after He died; it was formulated by Himself, and by Him it was asserted more conspicuously, and with greater frequency and emphasis toward the close of His earthly life. It was the only charge on which He was condemned; all other accusations brought against Him broke down; but this one He admitted—that He called Himself the Son of God. Questioned upon it, He would not retract. “Thou sayest,” was all His reply, and for the saying He was ordered to the cross. Yet upon the cross His assertion was strengthened. Had He been a pretender, He would never have so comported Himself before Pilate and Herod; had He been self-deluded, He never would have said to His fellow-sufferer on Calvary: “To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.” The torture of crucifixion was sufficient to expel the hallucinations of the maddest brain, but the Evangelists show that while faith in His Messiahship was, during His crucifixion, fading even from His disciples, in Himself it was stronger than ever, and at the very last it was communicated to a dying robber, who trusted that He had power to absolve him, and to open to him the gates of a better life. Now, all this surely never could naturally have occurred to Jewish men to conceive, and if their records be only fictions, the devout creations of over fond imaginations, then their legends are miracles themselves.

Some one has said that it is possible to find in the Buddhist books a parallel to every incident in the Gospels; if so, these parallels will be found to be very far apart; but to the incident of the Crucifixion there can be no parallel. That one historical event separates not only the two systems of thought and belief, but marks off Christianity from all other religions in the world. Till the crucifixion of Jesus was accomplished, the idea of associating with Deity humiliation, and of conceiving of God as dying the death of a slave upon the cross, would have been regarded as the grossest impiety. The fundamental idea of the Incarnation was not wholly foreign to the mind either of India or of Greece; to the Jew it was not a natural thought, but one so anti-Semitic that Jew and Moslem alike have rejected Christianity because of it;[171] but the incarnation of Deity represented in the Gospels, the humiliation of the Godhead implied in the Crucifixion, is an idea which never could have originated in the mind of either Gentile or Jew. It is one of the things of God which the natural man cannot conceive, a mystery hid from all ages until it was revealed, and apparently, unless we admit the reality of the revelation, we never can account for the faith.

The miraculous personality of Christ is thus the outstanding and distinctive feature of the Christian writings. As the mists clear away in the East, Buddha emerges more and more in the stature of a good and great man, but Christ rises upon us as one who cannot be accounted for according to the measure of any man, nor even that of an angel. It is not as a teacher, a guide out of the difficulties of life, that He meets us, but as a Revealer and Saviour. It is thus He has been accepted by His disciples, and upon their faith He has reared His Church. It is thus He conceived of Himself, and His conception is not more astounding than are the simplicity and lowliness and meekness of His character. He is Himself thus the miracle of miracles, wholly inexplicable on any human theory devised to account for Him; and till that one miracle is solved, all questions as to the miracles which are ascribed to Him can afford to wait for their solution.

We have no desire to exaggerate the value of the miraculous elements in Christianity, but it does not appear to be true wisdom that would depreciate them or ignore them altogether. Miracles by many have been wrongly considered, and they have been often expounded by the advocates of Christianity in such a way as to create instead of removing difficulties connected with the faith. On the other hand, many who reject or refuse to consider them seem afflicted by a kind of mental semeiophobia which in its own way may be as dangerous an affliction as hydrophobia is. The proper way is to consider them in relation to the nature and purpose of the Revelation with which they are associated. The miracle may sometimes be found only in the form of the narrative, as a hieroglyph whose purpose we are too lazy to search for, whose meaning we are too stupid to elucidate. The theory that miracles are only figurative expressions of spiritual truth is not true, as it is generally expounded; but it has a truth in it which must never be overlooked. Every miracle is a parable, and every parable is a miracle. It is the spiritual reality revealed by both which gives them value, and not the wonder in them by which we are at first arrested. Yet without the wonder to arrest us we might never have received the revelation. “What did the apostle mean,” asks Robert Elsmere,[172] “by death to sin and self? what the precise idea attached by him to being risen with Christ? Are this death and resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain alleged historical events, or are they not primarily, and were there not, even in Paul’s mind, two aspects of a spiritual process perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting witness of the Father? the spiritual history of the individual and of the world, or the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attached such importance?” The envelope certainly would be as worthless without the message which it carries as a husk from which the kernel has dropped. Would St. Paul, however, ever have conceived the spiritual truths referred to, if they had not been suggested by historical facts? Could he ever have conceived of a death to sin had the world never witnessed the death of the Holy Christ upon the cross? Could he ever have dreamed of rising again in the power of a new life if the tomb in the garden nigh Golgotha had never been found empty of its crucified occupant? Is he not just suggesting the significance of very exceptional historical events? He may be wrong in his interpretation, but there can be no mistake that the interpretation is founded upon the history, that it was the event which originated his theory, and not his theory that produced the story of the event. Christian theology, instead of giving this miraculous character to the tragic story of the life and death of Christ, has been called into existence by man’s endeavours to account for it as a fact not only marvellous, but simply unique in the experience of mankind.

It is not likely that the miraculous elements in the Christian religion will be found to be “the produce of its primitive theology, which will fade out of the conception of men as theology advances and becomes purified.” The demonstration of this must not be assumed to be complete because the miraculous is also found in other religions. We must be able to account for it in all of them. It is, indeed, the natural tendency of humanity to magnify and eventually to deify its heroes, to embellish their careers with similar marvels, to apply to them figurative language very liable to be misunderstood, which in later generations hardens into erroneous beliefs. That Christians as well as Buddhists have done so is sufficiently attested by the apocryphal Gospels, but we must not conclude that because there are so many fictitious and counterfeit wonders in currency there can be no real miracles. We must examine each religion on its merits, and its miraculous elements in the light of their purpose and of their actual genesis; and if we do so in the case of Christianity, we will probably discover the one supernatural reality from which the shadows in all other religions are reflected, and to which they all point.[173]

Dr. Rhys Davids, in the Hibbert Lectures, informs us that the early Buddhist conception of Gotama was dominated and transformed by two ideals, neither of which had any necessary connection with the man himself. One of them, due to political experience, made him finally assume in the popular imagination the office of a Universal King; while the other, due to philosophic speculation, invested him with the attribute of Perfect Wisdom. The implied parallel between this conception, coloured as it grew by the sun myths which it incorporated, and the Christian conception of Jesus, suggested by the titles King of Glory and Divine Word, is obvious to everybody. Yet examination of the supposed similarities only reveals essential contrasts between the two sets of beliefs. The political experiences in India which are referred to occurred about two centuries after the death of Buddha. The victories of Chandragupta, resulting in the consolidation of a kingdom such as Indians had never before witnessed, combined with his patronage of the Buddhist monks, may have suggested the idea of the universal monarch. “His achievements recalled the nearly forgotten poetry of the Vedic legends, while the new and popular ethics of Buddha invested him with a righteousness which made him a worthy Lord of the Four Quarters (of the Globe).” So in one of the Suttas, said to be early, and which may have been assuming shape at this time, words like these are put in the mouth of Buddha:—“I am a king, O Sela, an incomparable, religious king; with justice I roll the wheel, the wheel that is irresistible.”[174] With this conception of Cakka-vatti, a glorious king, was connected, avers Dr. Rhys Davids, that of an age in which plenty and peace were to abound as the fruits of righteousness.[175] The idea of a golden age is common to most religions, and as the Western Aryans always preserved it, we may conclude that the branch which reached India carried it thither with them. Soon, however, as the belief in transmigration took possession of them, they seem to have lost it. Their book of the generations of man did not mount higher than the Fall; existence was essentially evil in their thought, and belief in a golden age on earth, either in the past or in the future, was quite inconsistent with the creed which Buddhists inherited or created. The other branch of the Aryan stock so cherished it that it adorns their most beautiful mythologies; but even with them the golden age was always placed in the past, and the world, fallen from good, was supposed to be degenerating from bad to worse. And so it is that the fondest glances of even the happy Greek are not forward but backward cast, and that sadness mingles with his most mirthful music.