"Most assuredly we require an explanation of our present condition, and we must accord all honour to Buddhism for having afforded us one both rational and satisfactory. When men come to see and to realize that by every deed committed, and by every word uttered, they are carving out, for evil or good, the future of the race, and that the suffering they now endure they owe entirely to the past sins of humanity, their sense of responsibility will be increased, their hold upon morality strengthened, the bond of unity, 'the brotherhood of man,' confirmed. Abolish the fallacy of cosmic chaos; substitute in its stead the idea of a definite system and purpose; show that man is the only framer of his destiny, the only author of his existence, the only cause of his own suffering--and the foundation of morality will be made sure, the redemption of the race brought within measurable distance. This is the end for which the doctrine of Karma was formulated, and to this end it has been labouring, a silent but progressive force, for many centuries." The Rev. T. Sterling Berry, D.D., in his _Comparative Study of Christianity and Buddhism_, treats the latter as a whole in a spirit of commendable catholicity; but when he comes to points of contrast he fails signally to preserve equanimity of judgment, and distorts the import of Gotama's precepts in the most amazing fashion in his endeavour to bring them into opposition to the teaching of Jesus. His view of Karma, however, is, I think, a valuable contribution to the literature on the subject, and worthy of reproduction. He writes: "Strange and well nigh unintelligible as this theory seems, it is nevertheless possible, I believe, to get at the real thought that moulded Gotama's conception--actions of every kind as possessing the nature of seed sown; men were found, to some extent, to reap the consequences of their actions during their lifetime; but this takes place only in a limited and incomplete sense during the existence to which the actions belong. At the close of a life many acts remain like seed sown, but not yet grown up. Hence the theory that when a man dies he leaves the sum-total of the acts of his life as a kind of complex seed, made up of good and bad elements, which, by his death, springs up into a fresh existence, the same and yet not the same; in somewhat of the sense in which it might be said that ordinary seed which springs up as identical and yet not identical with that which is sown. Viewed in this light, the theory loses its apparent absurdity. It becomes, in fact, a mode of expressing partly what we understand by the law of heredity, which involves a transference of character and a reproduction of the consequences of action; and partly the law of retribution, that 'Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.'"