But, although Buddhism affected the lives of certain Christians, it in no way touched their faith--that life was the result of contact with Manichæism, which taught that all matter was evil, and that the flesh must be subdued, as essentially ungodly. The Buddhist religion in its ethics is the absolute reverse of the Christian. The Buddhist prays and tortures, and stupefies himself for purely selfish reasons, so as to escape reincarnation in the form of a bug, a louse, or a worm, by the destruction within himself of all human passions and inclinations. His self-torture is undertaken for the object of absorption into Nirvana, only to be reached by reducing the mind and heart to absolute indifference to every animal desire, and thus to escape the eternal revolution of metempsychosis. "No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself," is a maxim incomprehensible to a Buddhist. As Mr. Landon says: "The spiritual brigandage of the Lamas finds its counterpart in many other creeds, but it would be unjust not to record in the strongest terms the great radical difference that exists between Lamaism at its best and Christianity at its worst. There has never been absent from the lowest profession of our faith a full recognition of the half-divine character of self-sacrifice for another. Of this the Tibetians know nothing. The exact performance of their duties, the daily practice of conventional offices, and continual obedience to their Lamaic superiors is for them a means of escape from personal damnation in a form which is more terrible perhaps than any monk- conjured Inferno. For others they do not profess to have even a passing thought. Now this is a distinction which goes to the very root of the matter. The fact is rarely stated in so many words, but it is the truth that Christianity is daily judged by one standard, and by one standard only--its altruism, and this complete absence of carefulness for others, this insistent and fierce desire to save one's own soul, regardless of a brother's, is in itself something that makes foreign to one the best that Lamaism can offer."
One day a gnat stung S. Macarius, and he killed it. To punish himself for this, he went to the marshes of Scete, and stayed there six months. When he returned to his brethren he was so disfigured by the bites of the insects that they recognised him only by the tone of his voice. A Brahmin would have been filled with remorse lest he had killed a reincarnation of his grandmother, but the Egyptian ascetic only because he had given way to momentary irritation.