As was the world to whom the Buddha preached so was the world to whom the Christ preached six hundred years later. Their codes of conduct were the same. Against violence they taught resignation, against the search for glory they taught renunciation; they opposed pride with meekness, struggle with calm, success in this world by happiness in the next. They came to redress the balance of the world; they came to make men hope. And therefore it is impossible to take their codes by themselves and consider them, to reject them because they do not express the exact truth. What is to be considered is not that code alone, but the purpose it came to fulfil. The codes of Buddha and of Christ are exaggerations, that is true; they cannot be lived up to in their entirety, that is also true. Taken alone they are impossible; that is true. Are they then untrue, useless, valueless guides to conduct? Not quite so. For man is so built that he requires an exaggeration. If you would persuade him to go with you a mile you must urge him to come two; if you would have him acquire a reasonable freedom you must create in him an enthusiasm for unreasonable freedom; if you would have him moderate his passions he must be adjured to wholly suppress them. And therefore, it may be, do these codes of Buddha and Christ live. Not because they are absolutely true, not because they furnish an ideal mode of life, not in order to be fully accepted, but because they are exaggerations that balance exaggerations; and out of the mean has come what is worth having; because they have an effect which the exact truth would not have in the masses of men. They have been truth, because their results were true. * * * * * But the world is growing older, it is learning many things. Never again can we hear that cry of _Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite_, the enthusiasms of a nation for its ideals. These ideals were true then, they were true because their work was true. But their work is done; men's eyes are open now, we do not require such exaggerations to move us to our work. They were in themselves but half truths. It required the violent assertions of inequality, of slavery, to make up a whole truth. With one has died the necessity for the other. And so it may be with the codes of Buddhism and Christianity. They were true in their day, because they had their work to do. To have any effect at all they had to be enormous exaggerations; to earn any respect or attention they had to be proclaimed as perfect, as divine. But now, with the dying of the old brutalities, with the growth of civilisation, of humanity, and culture, the old savage exaggerations are dying out. The world is more refined, more effeminate, more clear-sighted. It says to itself, "These codes, if divine and perfect, must be capable of being implicitly obeyed; but they cannot be obeyed, and therefore they are not divine."