♦The Story of India♦ Beyond other lands the great land of India has borne the burden of the havoc which has been wrought in this world of ours, and through it in the fair universe of God; and she has realized deeply that man has had some awful share in the tragedy. Her religious teaching is the expression of her sense of this fact, and of her yearning after the re-uniting of each several severed part with the original Oneness. To this end the appalling panorama presented to the view in such a city as Benares--the washings, the offerings and acts of worship, the pilgrim processions from temple to temple. To this end the fastings and austerities, the renunciations, the so-to-speak experiments in ways of salvation. And to this end the long thoughts and dreams of the centuries, and the missions of men like Gautama. The history of the Passion of India is, rightly understood, the most noble which the world has known, with one exception only. The huge blunders into which she has fallen take nothing from the grandeur of the story, they add much to its pathos. She has dreamed that man must seek God, and has never had the vision of God seeking man. She has failed to evolve the idea of a personal God, a living, speaking, loving God; and the pantheism into which she has drifted seems to us at best a poor thing, and at worst a bad thing. Life has failed of any moral significance. But the great heart of India is fundamentally right. Her mistakes are not, as has been so often affirmed, of the essence of her nature; they are only the best solution which her unaided mind and heart could discover, of the problem of the sorrow of the world. The greatest of her Masters was Gautama the Buddha, who proved, in one aspect of his teaching, too great for her acceptance, in another, too narrow; and he was rejected, not, however, before he made an ineffaceable mark upon her thought, and not before she had sent his influence far over the world. ♦Gautama♦ Gautama, known as the Buddha, was born at Kapila Wastu, on the river Rohini, about a hundred miles from Benares, some 550 years before Christ. He came of a noble family. Wonderful tales, most of them legends of a comparatively recent date, are told of his birth, childhood, and youth; little is really known. He was chivalrous and noble in character, and revealed very early a peculiarly sensitive temperament; the sight of suffering overwhelmed him; and his father, whose only child he was, brought him up in strictest seclusion, sheltering him, so far as might be, from contact with the darker aspects of life.