This should be borne in mind when in translations of Buddhist books we find such words as “holiness,” “saints,” “paths or degrees of sanctification,” “righteousness,” and such like. The original words represent conceptions different from and antagonistic to those suggested by these words to us. But keeping this in view, we may well admire and be thankful for the high purpose and clear moral insight which enabled Buddha to discover and set forth his way to Nirvana. The strength and glory of Buddhism, the secret of its original attractiveness, and of its long continuance, is its ethical system. Its metaphysical creed may represent a very puerile philosophy, its discipline of artificial restraint may have been the reverse of emancipation, but its moral code, in its simple and direct and powerful appeal to the conscience, is a far nearer approach to the Gospel than that of Gentile Stoics or of Jewish Scribes. Avoiding sensuality on the one hand as degrading, and asceticism on the other as unprofitable, it mapped out a _via media_ that led far above that projected by any ancient school. It entered into every domain of life, of thought and word and deed;[211] laid its control, as Christianity does, on feeling and motive, and proclaimed that the way to perfect peace was a way which no unrighteous man could enter and no unclean man could tread. It is very interesting to catch, behind all its superstitions and idolatries, and crude and childish speculations, this glimpse of an ideal like unto that of the Son of Man, calling and leading men to righteousness, purity, and kindness, as their only refuge. To the old Vedic religion, and to all the class of religions of which it is the type, morality, as we have seen, was a stranger. It was the philosopher, and not the priest, who in old times argued of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come. The Hebrew, as we have seen, was the first and only ancient religion that demanded holiness of life as indispensable to the worship of God, and Christianity, as was natural, recognised this old law which men had from the beginning. But Buddhism was the first system in which morality was substituted for religion. It had neither priests, nor temples, nor prayers, but taught men to depend for safety solely upon a life of virtue and wisdom and goodness. Though it implied a change of heart amounting to conversion, this was due to the operation of no regenerating spirit, but to perseverance in courses within the reach of any one. Anticipating, therefore, theories of life broached now-a-days as if they were new discoveries, its endeavour to dissociate the human from the supernatural, and to substitute the ethical for the religious, deserves very earnest study.