The last portion of the Brahmin’s life is devoted likewise to meditation and contemplation. He is no more subjected to the ordeal of rigorous penances; nature has been subdued; passions silenced and destroyed; the soul has obtained the mastery over the body and the material world. She is free from all the trammels and obstacles that impeded her contemplation of truth. She is ready to quit this world, as the bird leaves the branch of the tree when it pleases him. The Buddhist religious, having likewise crushed his passions and disentangled his soul from affection to matter, delights only in the contemplation of truth. As the mighty whale sports in the bosom of the boundless ocean, so the perfected Buddhist launches forth into abstract and infinite truth, delights in it, completely estranged from this world, which meditation has taught him to consider as a mere illusion, as destitute of reality. He is then ripe for the so ardently coveted state of Neibban. When Buddha originated the plan of a society of religious, and framed the regulations whereby it was to be governed, he had but to look around him for patterns of a religious life. The country where he had been born, the society in which he had been brought up, swarmed with religious following the different systems of philosophy prevailing in those days. He saw them, conversed with them, and for some time lived in their company under the same disciplinary institutions. He was, therefore, thoroughly conversant with all that in his days constituted a religious life. But the same bold and enterprising spirit which made him dissent from his masters and contemporaries on many important questions of morals and metaphysics, and induced him to improve, as he thought, and perfect theories in speculative and practical philosophy, impelled him also to do something similar respecting the disciplinary regulations to which his religious were to be hereafter subjected. We freely confess that on this latter point he was eminently successful. The body of Buddhist religious is infinitely superior in most respects to the other societies of Indian religious. The regulations of the former breathe a spirit of modesty, mildness, and unaffectation, which in a striking manner contrasts with those disgusting exhibitions of self-inflicted penances so fondly courted by Brahmins, where immodesty seems to dispute the palm with cruelty. Buddha opened the door of his society to all men without any distinction or exception, implicitly pulling down the barriers raised by the prejudices of caste. Did he in the beginning of his public career lay down the plan of destroying all vestiges of caste, and proclaiming the principle of equality amongst men? It is, to say the least, very doubtful. The equalising principle itself was never distinctly mentioned in his discourses. But he had sown all the elements constitutive of that principle in his instructions. Every member put on the religious dress