The charity which the Buddhist monk practised was in his preaching and exposition of the law for the deliverance of the multitudes. And that this may be the very highest form in which benevolence can express itself all Christians must admit, for the greatest gift which any man can bestow is the truth which makes one free. Buddhist monk and Christian missionary alike proclaimed a gospel for the redemption of men; and as the gospel of Christ’s salvation brings ever many blessings in its train, so the preaching of the mendicant Buddhist was attended with material beneficial results to those who heard and believed it. The Buddhist, however, while expounding the law for the rescue of the individual, never laboured, like the Christian missionary, for his temporal and social improvement. His message had no promise for the life that now is, and consequently he never seems to have played the part so nobly sustained by many of the monks of Christendom—that of defending the oppressed and befriending the helpless. He never, so far as can be gathered from the texts, proclaimed the equality of men in the same way and for the same purpose as a Christian reformer would preach it. Theoretically, he maintained the right of all classes to be admitted to the brotherhood, but Dr. Oldenberg has asserted that “in the composition of the Order a marked leaning to the existing aristocracy was observable.”[268] Buddha never had occasion to confess with the Christian apostle “that not many noble, not many mighty, were called,” nor had his Order ever to bear the reproach of the Church, that its members were recruited from the lowest strata of society. The references to his disciples from the first all indicate people of rank and wealth and education. It is not implied that persons of humble origin would have been rejected had they come, only that “the scriptures afford no evidence that they did come”; and yet they yield unmistakable evidence that, as the Order prospered, all lepers, cripples, blind, or one-eyed persons, all who were deaf and dumb, all who were consumptive or subject to fits, were rejected.[269] The Order was for the reputable, the noble, and especially for the religious, for the Brahman votary, and Sraman seeker after truth. These again were all attracted to it; they were not sought out as by the Christian Church. Not for one moment would Christ allow the Church to become select. He not only welcomed all penitents—for all men needed salvation, and the poorest and the guiltiest were most in need of it,—but He sent forth His apostles to seek and gather them, and in order to reason down all natural fears, based on the personal unworthiness of these outcasts of society, they were instructed to “compel them to come in.”[270]