For again, Christ conquered because from the beginning to the closing agony He stood firm rooted in obedience and in submission to the will of a Higher than self; but the Buddhist writers want to impress the very opposite of this upon us in regard to Gotama’s victory. He is said to have conquered Mâra by the force of his own will, and won his way to light by his individual energy alone. After he became Buddha he hesitated whether he would preach the way of deliverance to men, not because, like Moses and the Hebrew prophets, he had no confidence in himself and required the assurance of a divine strength not his own. He had perfect assurance in himself, but he had no confidence at first in the ability of others to comprehend and to follow him in a way so difficult to find and so hard to tread.[139] He asked no deity to help him, for he was greater and wiser than all the gods. In the legends Brahma is said in intercession to have pressed him to preach the way, and moved eventually by no intercession, but simply by his own pity for men lost in the vortices of miserable existence, he went forth in no strength but his own to preach and to teach in a ministry, not of shame and humiliation and death, but one of great exaltation and honour. This conception colours the narrative of his whole career. In the later scriptures he is designated the Tathâgata (He who has gone or arrived at Nirvana), the very reverse and point-blank contradiction of Christ the Messiah, He who was sent. There was no higher to send him, no wiser to teach. He came in his own name; but Jesus, as one sent by Him into the world, went forth in the name of His Father. Though He made demands upon the faith of the world compared with which the pretensions of Gotama are trivial—for at the highest he only claimed to be Buddha the Enlightened, while Christ spake of Himself as the “Light of the world,”—yet in Christ’s claim there was ever a sense of dependence expressed or implied, as of one who of His own self could do nothing, and who only taught what His Father had showed Him. Both spake with authority, and not as the scribes; both superseded the traditional domination of what was said by men of old times with the emphatic “I say unto you”; but there is a vast difference in the quality of this authority in the two cases. The authority of Buddha sprang from his acknowledged intellectual superiority, but the authority of Jesus sprang from spiritual insight. The deliverances of Buddha were given after the manner of a Socratic dialogue, and he won his converts and vanquished opponents by his dialectic skill.[140] But in all the encounters of Christ with His enemies there was no forcing of their reason to gain His end. His replies and counter questions were brief and direct and incisive; they were like the fiat of a king or the sentence of an unchallengeable judge, from which reason and conscience alike confessed that there could be no appeal.