It meant man’s earnest resolve to work out his salvation with fear and trembling, for there is no God within him working both to will and to do of His good pleasure. It was an attempt to conceive of a morally governed universe without a Governor. Professedly atheistic compared with the religion out of which it arose, it has been properly described to be “more theistic at its core than Brahmanism has ever been.”[212] It did not trouble itself about the origin of man as an emanation from the universal self, but it asserted the dignity of his nature as resting on really a sounder basis. It refused to believe with the Hebrew that the Creator had written the law on the tables of the heart, but it found the law there written somehow, and read it almost as correctly. Like the Christian apostle, its founder asserted that each man was a law unto himself, the judge of his own action, and the arbiter of his fate. And thus it came to pass that, without any conscious purpose of doing so, he inaugurated a moral revolution which lasted for ages. It swept away an enormous mass of superstitions from the Indian mind for centuries, abolished many abuses, and modified more which it failed to overcome. It has tended to civilise many barbarous races; and if among them Buddhism has been able to bear the encumbrance of their hideous idolatries which it assumed, it is because of the strong ethical foundation upon which it rests. It is the ethical element in religion that is universal and enduring, and there is a completeness and force and persuasiveness of ethical teaching in Buddhism which all non-Christian religions lack; there is a comprehensiveness of duty and gentleness which pre-intimate clearly that universal Christian rule which makes it imperative that we should not only duly consider all brethren who are human, but should say to the worm, as within the scope of our benevolence, “Thou art my mother and sister.”