The singular eminence of the religion of Jesus depends upon a right apprehension of the principle just illustrated. The Christian life is and must be a _Via Crucis_, yet at the same time is the way that leadeth unto life. The principle of dying to live as enunciated by Christ differs from that of even the greatest of His predecessors in the recognition that true gladness is conditioned by self-crucifixion. Human nature has been slow to learn the lesson. The great renunciation of Gautama Buddha, for example, consisted in the repression of individuality and the destruction of the natural desires. The effect of his system was negative; the higher life was to be one of self-suppression, a very different thing, surely, from self-crucifixion. Gautama placed the ideal in ceasing to live; Christ, on the other hand, taught His followers to live more deeply, truly and grandly than before. To follow Jesus, now as always, means to feel more and not less, to add to the sum of our interests, and not to take from them, to raise the standard of our hopes, not to depress it. Like Gautama, He calls for a renunciation, but that renunciation is the gateway into larger life. The solemn gladness of Christian experience finds its parallel in no other teaching that the world has ever received. How can we be surprised that ascetics and hedonists within the bosom of the Christian Church itself have so frequently and lamentably mistaken the spirit of their Master's teaching? The ideal of Thomas à Kempis, in spite of its beauty, is no more that of Jesus than was the ideal of Gautama. How slowly men come to learn that peace and tribulation, joy and suffering, gladness and the Cross, are not incompatible, but the very conditions of each other!