The Rev. A. Sherring points out how the success of Gotama in overcoming the forces opposed to him "is unparalleled in human history.... That a solitary man, prince and ascetic, after pondering for five years over all the great doctrines of religions, priestcraft, falsities, the immoralities, shams, and confusions of those times, and the groans and miseries of his countrymen, that he should devise an entirely new system, think it out, and put it in order to meet objectors and overcome their arguments, and then go forth to the gradual conquest of India, and send forth missionaries who have converted 500 millions of people--that all this was the ultimate result of that one man's energy, sagacity, and resoluteness of will is assuredly one of the most astounding events in the annals of the world. He was a simple philosopher, reasoner, and calm disputant, employing no physical force whatever; while the morality which he enforced was the purest the world ever saw." General Forlong, in quoting this passage, says: "Such, divested of a few professional words, is the deliberate opinion of one of the best, the most learned and experienced missionaries." Professor Rhys Davids seems to level a shaft at the typical Christian when he says that the Buddhist saint does not mar the purity of his self-denial by lusting after a positive happiness in a world to come; nor, it might be added, does the essential Christian who realizes the kingdom of heaven within. If we take the word "God" in a restricted anthropomorphic sense, and the word "soul" to mean an entity that survives the body, it will appear strange to many, as Professor Rhys David says, that a religion which ignores the existence of such a God, and denies the existence of such a soul, should be the very religion which has found most acceptance among men. The same authority remarks that of any immaterial existence Buddhism knows nothing. This is true if "immaterial" or "spiritual" is taken to mean something altogether divorced from matter. The universe, according to Buddhism, is not merely an arrangement of matter into forms and substances, but it consists also of the qualities of matter, and the relationship of the different particles and qualities to each other. The philosophy of Buddhism, in this connection, is Monism, which is described by its exponents as "a unitary world-conception, but not a one-substance theory. It does not imply that the world consists either of matter alone or of spirit alone, or that all its phenomena are motions only; but that our concepts of spiritual, material, mechanical, and other processes are abstractions, representing special features of reality; reality itself being one inseparable and indivisible entirety."