Buddhism has a more profound originality, but it also is afflicted with
an inward dualism which will ruin it. From the beginning there have
been two Buddhisms: the one an esoteric philosophy for the use of sages
convinced by experience of the vanity of all things, suffering from the
essential evil of existence and aspiring to Nirvana. It is an
unfruitful mysticism because it is Atheistic. The other is popular
Buddhism, which sinks and dies into puerile superstitions and into the
grossest polytheism. From which we may conclude that Buddhism only
becomes universalist when it ceases to be a positive religion, and that
where it still remains a religion it is anything but universalist.
With Christianity it is altogether different. The terms "universal
religion" and "Christian religion" coincide so exactly that if a form
of Christianity is not universalist on any side, on that particular
side it ceases to be Christian. In fact there cannot here be either
division or esoterism, nor consequently limitation or narrowness. We
are here in the absolute freedom of spirit. Christ did not propound
the theory of the unity of the human race; but He did something quite
different and much better: He gave us the gospel. Between His gospel
and the humanitarian philosophy there is all the difference that there
is between abstraction and life, between idea and love. All men enter
into the kingdom of God by the same door, and that door cannot be shut
by any one; for it is the door of humility, of confidence, of
self-renunciation, of the higher righteousness fulfilling itself by
fraternal charity. Rank in that kingdom is determined by the measure
of devotedness. The greatest is the one that humbles himself the most,
and the only way of being master is to serve. In the religion of Jesus
there is nothing religious but that which is authentically moral, and
nothing moral in human life that is not truly religious. The perfect
religion coincides with the absolute morality, and this naturally
extends to and is obligatory on all mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed
the only God, or even the God who is spirit, whose worship could not
thenceforth be confined to anything material or particular in time and
space: He showed us the Father who loves all His children with an equal
affection, and desires to dwell in the humblest as well as in the
highest consciousness. This divine Fatherhood, in proportion as it is
realised in our hearts, produces in them human brotherhood. The
religious and the human ideals here join, no more to be separated.
Having begun in the animal man, with the grossest form of religion,
humanity finds itself completed in the perfect religion.
3. _Progress in Representations of the Divine_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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