It is the fact of this complete independence of each other in origin, coupled with their analogous development, and the many supposed agreements in their systems, which makes the study of Buddhism so interesting. What does this signify? What important law in providence does it indicate or illustrate? Our best guides content themselves with calling attention to the analogies, and they are chary as yet of drawing inferences from them. The wisdom of such caution is apparent when we find that the supposed coincidences require to be examined and discussed. Most of them have been found to be superficial and accidental, and, when probed, very essential and fundamental contrasts are discovered beneath them. Now to judge correctly concerning these religions we must try not their analogies but their contradictions. The analogies may be only seeming, and the contrasts may be very real and profound. On every point that is truly characteristic the two religions may be separated as widely as the zenith is from the nadir. All religions are parallel in their tendencies, and every approach to truth must inevitably produce resemblances in religious belief. The resemblances may indicate the aspirations of a moral and religious nature common to all men; and in what is peculiar to Christianity, what it possesses in contrast, may be found the divine answer to these aspirations. The two religions may proceed in parallel lines, but on very different planes, and from quite opposite directions. Thus the morality of Buddhism so deservedly admired is in no sense peculiar to Buddhism, for much of it was taught in India before Buddha appeared, and in China before his law was proclaimed in it. It is the natural outgrowth of the moral sense of mankind where circumstances are favourable to its development. But high as the law of Buddha is, it only “approaches, swings toward,” as Oldenberg tells us, but never reaches or touches the law of Christ.[46] There is in the Christian Gospel something which the Buddhist system plainly lacks, and which Buddhism out of any evolution of its own inherent energy could never produce. Christianity seems to be superior to it, not in the sense that the infant is superior to the embryo, but as man is superior to the animal, which yet may be said of very necessity to precede him. The lower organism in creation, though not accounting for the higher, may reach out after and indicate the necessity for it, and the higher by fulfilling the lower will interpret it. Just as the mineral, vegetable, and animal world all point to some higher creative fact, which in man is to sum up and perfect them, so the many lower religions of the human race all point to a higher, which is to annul and fulfil them. No theory of evolution has yet accounted for man. He appears in the universe as a new creature while part of a very old system of creation, and related to all its inferior forms. So Christianity, in one sense as old as human