It seemed to him that there ran in some ways a great sameness through the creeds, that up to a certain stage they differed but little. Courage against the foe, courage to face suffering, truth and honesty, and later mercy and compassion, charity of act and thought, courtesy and beauty of mind; these were the additions the faiths made, little by little, to the ground-work of reverence of the gods. And so they grew, adding bit by bit, as civilisation increased and necessity dictated. They added many of them sanitary rules, observances for washing, for cooking, for choosing food, incorporating with religion whatever practice found useful, and thereby giving a sanctity which it would otherwise have lacked. Sometimes rules were added to preserve the race pure, as with the Jews or the Hindus, evolving in the latter religion into the vast system of caste that separates the different races, all of whom call themselves Hindus. With the two faiths as just mentioned the tendency was to narrowness and restriction, to the exclusion of other races; with others, such as the Mahommedan and Buddhist, it was to expansion, to the acceptance of other peoples, until at last some great Prophet arose to give coherence and form to the whole and include it in the sacred books. So arose the codes, the man thought. But this hardly matters. What are the codes? It seemed to him that out of all the faiths only two held codes that rose much above the level of savage conduct. We cannot go back to the codes of Moses or Mahommed; we cannot accept the narrow racial limitations of Hinduism; we have outgrown the simple ethics of Zoroaster and the Egyptians. The teachings of Confucius and Laotze are strange to us, and the philosophies, if they seem clear, are so singularly unconvincing. They lack so greatly all that appeals to mankind; they are so much codes in the head and not for the heart; they are as mathematical drawings compared to a work of art; they do not ring true. And so there were quickly left for him only two, the codes of Christ and of Buddha, the examples of the two greatest prophets the world has known.