It was natural that the most successful opposition to priestcraft should have originated in the caste next in rank to the Br[=a]hmans. Gautama (afterwards called "the Buddha") was a man of the military class (Kshatriya). He was the son of a petty chief who ruled over a small principality called Kapila-vastu, north of the Ganges; but he was not the sole originator of the reactionary movement. He had, in all probability, been preceded by other less conspicuous social reformers, and other leaders of sceptical inquiry. Or other such leaders may have been contemporaneous with himself. We have already pointed out that the philosophy he enunciated was not in its general scope and bearing very different from that of Br[=a]hmanism. The Br[=a]hmans called their system of doctrines "Dharma,"[1] and the Buddha called his by the same name. He recognised no distinguishing term like Buddhism. His simple aim was to remove every merely sacerdotal doctrine from the national religion--to cut away every useless excrescence, and to sweep away every corrupting incrustation. His own doctrines of liberty, equality, and general benevolence towards all creatures, ensured the popularity of his teaching; while the example he himself set of asceticism and self-mortification, secured him a large number of devoted personal adherents. For it is remarkable that just as the Founder of Christianity was Himself a Jew, and required none of His followers to give up their true Jewish creed, or Jewish usages, so the founder of Buddhism was himself a Hind[=u], and did not require his adherents to give up every essential principle of ordinary Hind[=u]ism, or renounce all the religious observances of their ancestors.[2] Yet it cannot be denied that Buddhism was very different from Br[=a]hmanism, and it is a remarkable fact that, with all his personal popularity, the atheistic philosophy of Gautama was unsuited to the masses of the people. His negations, abstractions, and theories of the non-eternity and ultimate extinction of soul, never commended themselves to the popular mind.