We would be understating its claims, however, if we referred to it as appealing only to our Christian consideration and sympathy. It has been brought into the lists of criticism as the rival of Christianity. Modern unbelief is forcing it upon our notice as a much truer philosophy of existence and a more satisfactory theory of the universe than that furnished by Christianity. We cannot let it alone, were it for no other reason that it will not let us alone. In the civilised and semi-civilised portions of the East its disciples have long ago ceased to propagate it, and as a form of belief it may be said that there not only has it reached the limits of its extension, but that its present condition is one of “increasing disintegration and decay.”[14] Even in the East, however, among the classes who have most come under the influence of Western culture, the spirit of Buddhism shows considerable vitality, and there its spirit is coming into constant and active collision with Christianity every day. The educated or intelligent Buddhist of Burmah or Siam tells us plainly that he will not give up his ancient faith for Christianity; for notwithstanding the manifold and manifest absurdities of his ancestral religion, he professes to find the same in the forms in which Christianity has been presented to him. By the light of our science we have helped him to weed out his old superstitions, and he will not accept from us any new ones. In language marvellously akin to that of the founder of Buddhism, he discards every religion as involving the worship of deity, and he professes to find in Suttas more ancient than our Gospels a morality as sublime, a charity as comprehensive, and a system of faith sufficient to bear the strain of all his necessities, whether present or future.[15] In short, Buddhism as professed by a modern Oriental with any pretension to culture, is almost identical with that paradoxical condition of thought or belief which maintains, and indeed professes to be spreading in Christendom as modern Agnosticism.