If the animal creation profited by their charity, which they refused to their suffering fellow-men, it was from a selfish motive: for the parent, or wife, or child, whom by Buddha’s rule they were obliged to help, might be looking at them, for all they knew, out of the eyes of the beast, and not to fulfil the precept would bring to themselves both harm and loss.[227] Tested even socially, therefore, the Rule of Buddha is defective, and this because it is not founded on religion. The cause of God is eternally the cause of man. In the Fatherhood of God is essentially involved the universal brotherhood of man. Christ is before us as the representative of humanity, because He is the representative of Deity. Refusal to acknowledge His supremacy will disturb all human relationships and throw them into disorder. We learn to do to others as Christ hath done to us; the sense of our indebtedness will be the measure of our charity. For this end He has chosen the poorest and the most wretched as His memorials, and He has said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto Me.” To do justice to Buddha’s way, however, we must remember that the path of uprightness (_sila_) was only the first part of it. Without external rectitude, inward integrity would be impossible; but external rectitude, without self-concentration, would be a foundation without a structure. “A man must endeavour to keep constant watch over his thoughts, for our whole existence depends upon our thinking,”[228] was one of the noble maxims of Buddhism. It is to its credit as a religion that it recognised that only a small part of our real life can be expressed in words and deeds, that the true sphere of morality and human temptation was within, and that it instructed men to keep the heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. Buddha seems to have felt, and to have in part at least expressed, the contrast and conflict between the seen and the unseen in our life. He recognised, it is true, no soul, and the warfare between the flesh and the spirit was not found in his philosophy, but he had to account for the antagonism which every one feels between our animality and our humanity, between what is pressing or dragging us down, and what in us struggles to be free. The mental and moral qualities were of far more value than the physical; the invisible was of more consequence, because more real, than the visible. The “mindful and thoughtful man” was the man who “looked within and not without,” and so Buddha’s insistence upon the “noble earnestness of meditation” as indispensable to deliverance is a grand testimony to the truth, which no philosophy of materialism can falsify, that we are far more concerned with what we think and feel and imagine than with what we touch and we taste, and that our thoughts and feelings go far more into the weaving of our character than do our words and works.