“Finally, having attained the fourth degree, the ascetic possesses no more this feeling of beatitude, however obscure it may be ... he has also lost all memory ... he has reached impassibility, as near a neighbor of Nirvana as can be.... However, this absolute impassibility does not hinder the ascetic from acquiring, at this very moment, _omniscience and the magical power; a flagrant contradiction, about which the Buddhists_ no more disturb themselves than about so many others.”[596] And why should they, when these contradictions are, in fact, no contradictions at all? It ill behooves us to speak of contradictions in other peoples’ religions, when those of our own have bred, besides the three great conflicting bodies of Romanism, Protestantism, and the Eastern Church, a thousand and one most curious smaller sects. However it may be, we have here a term applied to one and the same thing by the Buddhist holy “mendicants” and Paul, the Apostle. When the latter says: “If so be that I might attain the _resurrection_ from among the dead [the Nirvana], not as though I had already attained, or were already _perfect_” (initiated),[597] he uses an expression common among the initiated Buddhists. When a Buddhist ascetic has reached the “fourth degree,” he is considered a rahat. He produces every kind of phenomena by the sole power of his freed spirit. A _rahat_, say the Buddhists, is one who has acquired the power of flying in the air, becoming invisible, commanding the elements, and working all manner of wonders, commonly, and as erroneously, called _meipo_ (miracles). He is a _perfect_ man, a demi-god. A god he will become when he reaches Nirvana; for, like the initiates of both Testaments, the worshippers of Buddha know that they “are gods.” “Genuine Buddhism, overleaping the barrier between finite and infinite mind, urges its followers to aspire, _by their own efforts_, to that divine perfectibility of which it teaches that man is capable, and by attaining which man becomes _a god_,” says Brian Houghton Hodgson.[598]