When the king heard that his grandson and his mother had gone to follow in the wake of the Buddha, he was sorely grieved. His son had left him. Eight messengers whom he had sent begging him to return had failed in their mission, and themselves remained as disciples with the Blessed One; and now he had but this child to look to for the perpetuation of his name and of his dynasty. Blind—and no wonder, for who can read the future?—he could not see that this son of his would win for himself and for his father a name beside which all the glory and pride of their Heaven-born ancestors would be but a cloud dispelled by the first ray of morning sun. Three influences have ruled the spirits of men since the dawn of the world—Buddha, Mohammed and One other, the greatest of the three. But that other was God. What would have been the winning of one or more provinces, what the slaughter of a few hundreds or even thousands of bowmen and spearmen, compared with the conquest of the souls of billions of fellow-creatures through the length and breadth of Asia? The old king’s name lives, but it lives as that of the father of no warrior, but of a great teacher whose doctrine has given peace and happiness to the souls of men instead of shedding the blood which clogs the footsteps of the earthly conqueror. We, holding fast the Christian creed, may say with confidence that of all mere _men_ who have lived since the creation of the world Buddha was the greatest. Next to him, I should count Confucius, and after Confucius, Mohammed. Nothing in Buddha’s life seems to me greater than the victory which he achieved over himself when he became convinced of the aimlessness of the ascetic life. He had left his palaces, his wife, and all the pomp of his father’s court, in order to fly from the world and its temptations and lead a life of privation and meditation. After six years he saw the futility of such a life. His aim was to do something that should redeem the world from sin and its miseries. How could solitude, starvation and mere meditation achieve that?