3. The Order.--There were monks before Buddhism. That religion made its appearance when Indian thought was at the stage of growth at which monastic communities may be expected to arise. When religion has ceased to be regarded as the affair of the nation or the tribe, and is cherished as the affair of the individual, when the mind turns from the sacrifices and ritual of public religion to cultivate relations with a power known chiefly in the heart and soul, and when religious duty has thus come to be recognised as a boundless and all-embracing thing, not a service the hands and feet can discharge, but the effort, never ending, still beginning, to make the whole personality with all its acts and aims conform to the ideal, then it is that men who are living for religion seek for such aid as they can give each other, and find it in an order and a discipline. The rules of the Buddhist Samgha or order are extant, and so are the rules of the contemporary Jainist fraternity. The Samgha resembled the Franciscan more than the other great Christian orders. The Bhikku on joining it abandoned his family and property, assumed the yellow robe and other scanty properties of the character, and lived thenceforth by begging, and in strict subjection to the rules, in which every detail of his food, his clothing, his residence, and his daily walk and conversation, were laid down. The two great objects of the society were mutual help in the religious life and the preaching of the doctrine. Under the first head come the frequent meetings of monks and the confessions they make to each other according to a fixed form. There is no vow of obedience; the monk obeys the law, not the human authority. In preaching they are to go one by one, and they are to preach to all. To all who would hear it was the gate open to this salvation. Here the Buddhist neglect of caste comes in. Buddhism makes no general or formal declaration of the equality of all men, nor is there any attack on the Brahman caste or any exaltation of the lower castes. The order drew its recruits at first from the ranks of the Brahmans. But the impelling motive of the new religion was compassion, and genuine compassion is not to be restrained in artificial limits. The salvation preached was fitted for all men. The disease to be cured was one from which all suffer, and the cure was one which all could at least begin to lay hold of. Thus Buddhism was fitted to break through the barriers of caste, and to gather into one religious community men of all castes alike. In the community, it was held, these distinctions disappeared. Not birth but conduct there made the true Brahman. The universalist tendency of the religion also fitted it to spread to other lands. It was not limited by anything in its teaching to the soil of India, nor to the territory of any particular set of gods. So wide indeed is its toleration, that a man may embrace it without giving up the faith in which he lived before.