The solution of religious problems, as far as they fall within the sphere of relative experience, is largely {28} a matter of personal conviction, determined by one’s intellectual development, external circumstances, education, disposition, etc. The conceptions of faith thus formulated are naturally infinitely diversified; even among the followers of a certain definite set of dogmas, each will understand them in his own way, owing to individual peculiarities. If we could subject their conceptions of faith to a strict analysis as a chemist does his materials, we should detect in them all the possible forms of differentiation. But all these things belong to the exterior of religion and have nothing to do with the essentials which underlie them. The abiding elements of religion come from within, and consist mainly in the mysterious sentiment that lies hidden in the deepest depths of the human heart, and that, when awakened, shakes the whole structure of personality and brings about a great spiritual revolution, which results in a complete change of one’s world-conception. When this mysterious sentiment finds expression and formulates its conceptions in the terms of intellect, it becomes a definite system of beliefs, which is popularly called religion, but which should properly be termed dogmatism, that is, an intellectualised form of religion. On the other hand, the outward forms of religion consist of those changing elements that are mainly determined by the intellectual and moral development of the times as well as by individual esthetical feelings. True Christians and enlightened Buddhists may, therefore, find their point of agreement in the recognition {29} of the inmost religious sentiment that constitutes the basis of our being, though this agreement does by no means prevent them from retaining their individuality in the conceptions and expressions of faith. My conviction is: If the Buddha and the Christ changed their accidental places of birth, Gautama might have been a Christ rising against the Jewish traditionalism, and Jesus a Buddha, perhaps propounding the doctrine of non-ego and Nirvâna and Dharmakâya. However great a man may be, he cannot but be an echo of the spirit of the times. He never stands, as is supposed by some, so aloof and towering above the masses as to be practically by himself. On the contrary, “he,” as Emerson says, “finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries.” So it was with the Buddha, and so with the Christ. They were nothing but the concrete representatives of the ideas and feelings that were struggling in those times against the established institutions, which were degenerating fast and menaced the progress of humanity. But at the same time those ideas and sentiments were the outburst of the Eternal Soul, which occasionally makes a solemn announcement of its will, through great historical figures or through great world-events.