And so while we ought to be profoundly thankful for the intellectual culture and moral earnestness that made Buddha, in spite of himself, the reformer of Eastern Asia, it is manifest that even his best doctrines represent very partial and one-sided truths, “dwelt upon with morbid intensity, to the exclusion of every fact which might have modified them.”[237] His fundamental error was his wild attempt to explain the life of man independently of Divine control, and to guide man safely through the perils and temptations of existence by an ethical system founded on no appeal to an eternal principle of goodness without, but solely to self-interest. The result, which has been to identify the nature of man with that of the animals,[238] surely shows conclusively that religion and morality can never be dissociated without damage to both. A religion without morality must degrade. A system of morality apart from religion will never upraise. Religion is for man simply indispensable. Deity is a necessity to him, and deity he must have, though he finds his god in a tree or makes it out of a stone. Man lives by faith, faith in his higher self, faith in a higher than himself, who alone can explain the conflict between his actual condition and the ideals which he conceives. The modern Buddhist assumes that “religion is the science of man, not the revelation of God, and he considers that comprehensions of deity are of far less consequence than just ideas of a man’s own self,”[239] but how can a man have a just idea of himself apart from some idea of God? According to his idea of God will be his estimate of himself. Buddhism, by ignoring God and preaching morality, has certainly failed to make its adherents moral, and it has imparted to what is noble in their morality the melancholy of despair.[240]