And what was Nirvana, the final refuge of the emancipated Buddhist? Ever since the religion was known in Europe great diversity of opinion has prevailed as to the meaning of this word. It was employed by the Brahmans many centuries before Buddha’s day, and used by them and by himself and his disciples in so great a variety of senses that even the learned Rajendralala Mitra, in enumerating the sects into which orthodox Buddhists are divided in regard to it, confessed some years ago that he had given up in despair the attempt to ascertain its meaning.[203] The researches and discoveries of later years have enabled the translators of the texts to write with less hesitation as to its significance, and we are entitled to accept as solid the results of their patient investigations. To begin with, they tell us that it means the peace which ensues when all passion has been subdued, and all selfish craving has been extinguished. Though practically no Buddhist hopes to attain to it here, but only to enter the paths leading to it, it may be reached, not in anticipation only, but in fruition.[204] Buddha may be said to have been in Nirvana forty years, for he entered it, not in the moment of dying, but when he attained perfection. This first conception of it, therefore, seems a marvellous anticipation of the faith of the Christian, who finds his heaven and enters into his rest when he is delivered from the φρόνημα τῆς σάρκος, from all selfish clutching at the means of existence. In both religions, taken at their highest, the goal of aspiration was not extinction of sorrow, but extinction of self-love: in Buddhism the quenching of _trishna_, or _upádána_, “thirst,” in Christianity the quenching of ἐπιθυμία, “lust,” “inordinate desire.” In both religions the goal meant finality, a state in which there was an end of death; and in both, moreover, it meant a change which no language could define, and to which no known standard could apply. The Christian believer tells us that he is passing from the visible to the invisible, from the temporal to the eternal, and in like manner the Buddhist Arahat would only be able to allude to the great change by negations, and as the very opposite of all we know or at present conceive. The Christian believes in the perseverance of the saints, and the Buddhist who has really entered the path must sooner or later reach his prize.