This is said to be the last outcome of Brahmanic belief, and “indeed the highest point reached by Indian philosophy.”[102] Manifestly, it can never be designated a gospel. It was a deliverance impossible for the many, and possible only for the few; a promise not to the suffering millions, but to the mystic and the sage, and to them it came not with the hope of a nobler character to be attained, and of a purer, higher life to be reached, but only with that of a dreamless repose—“the sleep eternal in an eternal night”—when the soul ceases to be soul, merged “like the weariest river” in a shoreless and waveless sea. And this was the system in which the wisest and saintliest in Buddha’s days were nurtured. He was no Brahman by caste, but as pure Kshatrya he would be instructed in his youth by Brahmans, and in early manhood he for long consorted with them. He had mental capacity, and spiritual energy, more than adequate to the task of comprehending as fully as they did their very abstruse theosophies. From their speculation he derived much of his terminology, like Karma and Nirvana; and even Buddha, words which, till recently, it was considered he had to coin. Many doctrines which were once regarded as peculiarly his own were taught in their jungle schools by learned Brahmans centuries before he was born. Without the Brahmans he could not have been produced, and yet his system will be found to be original and distinct. They furnished the phraseology in which he expressed himself, the methods by which he wrought, the institutions like that of the wandering Bikkhu, by which his system was spread; but in essentials we will find that his teaching was not only different from but antagonistic to theirs, and that, had the principles which he enunciated been truly accepted and consistently carried out, this noblest of the Reformers of Hinduism would have reformed it out of existence.