Dr. Paul Carus, in a chapter headed "Hinâyâna, Mahâyâna, Mahâsâtu" (p. 230, _Buddhism and its Christian Critics_), deals in a most masterly and effective manner with the value of the symbolic in contradistinction to the essential phases of Buddhism and Christianity. In judging the Mahâyâna system (of Buddhism) and its fantastical offshoots, he says: "We must consider the mental state of those nations for whom it was adapted, and it may be that a purer religion would have failed utterly where cruder allegories of what appears to us as childish superstitions exercised a beneficent influence. The Mahâyâna has changed the savage hordes of Central Asia, from whom proceeded the most barbarous hordes, dreaded by all their neighbours, into a most kind-hearted people, with a sacred passion for universal benevolence and charity." With reference to the Christian Church, he remarks: "What does it matter that, during the development of the Church, the letter of symbolically-expressed truth has crystallized into fixed dogmas?... He who believes in a myth that contains, in the garb of a parable, a religious truth, and accordingly regulates his moral conduct, is better off than he who is void of any faith. The truth hidden in the myth teaches him and serves him as a guide; it comforts him in affliction, strengthens him in temptation, and shows him in an allegorical reflection the bliss that rests upon righteousness." The words "rest," "peace," and "sleep" are in the New Testament more often associated with the conditions of a future life than such expressions as "joy" or "happiness." The word "joy" is only to be found once in direct connection with the word "heaven" in the New Testament--_i.e._, when there was joy in heaven over the repentance of a sinner. The omission may have been intentional, so that the world might understand that the joy of heaven would be something absolutely different from what we conceive of joy; that there will be a kind of joy, in which joy, as it is known here, is absent. "There remaineth, therefore, a rest for the people of God." "He that hath entered into his rest, he also has ceased from his own works as God did from his." "Let us labour therefore to enter that rest." "Ye shall find rest unto your souls." Such texts seem to draw heaven and Nirvana very close together. It is undoubtedly implied in some portions of the Christian Scriptures that the souls of the departed are asleep, and will not be disturbed till the coming of the Lord and the final judgment. "Does not the testimony of the Bible lead us to this conclusion; from the cry of the tired spirit of Samuel, awakened from its sleep by the Witch of Endor, 'Why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?' to the saying of the spirit in the Revelation, 'Yea, they rest from their labours.' In the case of Lazarus we have the words of Jesus to this effect: 'Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep'" (from _Light_).