I read a book long ago; I have forgotten the name of it, I have forgotten who wrote it, and I remember that at the time I did not understand it. The book was on the subject of perfect happiness, on heaven, which is postulated as the ideal peace. And what this book tried to show--what, indeed, it showed, I think--was that happiness if _perfect_ was near akin to annihilation. The argument ran something like this. "You are happy in some particular employment, say in singing a hymn, in some particular attitude, let us say in kneeling. If your happiness in this act and attitude is perfect, they will endure for ever. You will pass eternity kneeling and singing the same hymn. For consider, Why do you ever change your acts, your attitudes? Because a particular act or a certain attitude has become wearisome. But if it be stated that your happiness is _perfect_ you can never feel satiety, never feel any desire for change. The wish for change is born of the feeling of wearisomeness. You have had enough of one thing, you want another. But if you are perfectly happy this cannot be. Life would become a monotony, a satiety near akin to death. And if indeed peace be the highest happiness, then would this perfect peace be so near annihilation that the difference would only lie in that your consciousness of happiness still remained." Thus did this writer show that if the Christian heaven be as declared, _perfect_ happiness, so it must be almost indistinguishable from death. I do not think this writer had ever read of the Buddhist Nirvana, I do not remember that he ever even alluded to it. He was thinking of the Christian heaven and trying to make out what it was like, and that was what he found. He, taking the Christian ideal and working it to its inevitable conclusion, arrived at the same result as Buddhist teachers starting from such widely different premises have arrived at: the Christian heaven and the Buddhist peace are the same. Readers of my former work, "The Soul of a People," will remember how the Buddhists arrive at Nirvana. It is the "Great Peace." Life is the enemy. Life is change, and change is misery. The ideal is to have done with life, to be steeped in the Great Peace. Thus do the purer ideas of the Christian heaven and the Buddhist heaven agree. It is the "Peace that passeth all understanding" for each.