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.