[AR] "Our prayer is to Him to preserve us in future, to assist us in our troubles, to give us our daily food, not to be too severe upon us, not to punish us as we deserve; but to be merciful and kind. But the Buddhist has far other thoughts than these. He believes that the world is ruled by everlasting, unchangeable laws of righteousness. The Great God lives far behind His laws, and they are for ever and ever. You cannot change the laws of righteousness by praising them, or by crying against them, any more than you can change the revolution of the earth. Sin begets sorrow, sorrow is the only purifier from sin; these are eternal sequences; they cannot be altered; it would not be good that they should be altered. The Buddhist believes that the sequences are founded on righteousness, are the path to righteousness; and he does not believe he could alter them for the better, even if he had the power by prayer to do so.... This has been called a pessimism. Surely it is the greatest optimism the world has known--this certainty that the world is ruled by righteousness; that the world has been, that the world will always be, ruled by perfect righteousness.... The God who lies far beyond our ken has delegated his authority to no one. He works through everlasting laws. His will is manifested by unchangeable sequences. There is nothing hidden about His law that requires exposition by his agents, nor any ceremonies necessary for acceptance into his faith. Buddhism is a free religion. No one holds the keys of salvation but himself. Buddhism never dreams that anyone can save or damn you except yourself, and so a Buddhist monk is so far away from our ideas of a priest as can be. Nothing could be more abhorrent to Buddhism than any claim of authority of power from above, of holiness acquired, except by the earnest effort of a man's own soul" (_The Soul of a People_, by H. Fielding). Christianity and Buddhism cannot be differentiated in this matter of abstraction. Gibbon writes: "The fakirs of India and the monks of the Oriental Church were alike persuaded that, in total abstraction of the faculties of the mind and body, the purer spirit may ascend to the enjoyment and vision of the Deity." The opinion and practice of the monasteries of Mount Athos will be best represented in the words of an Abbot who flourished in the eleventh century. "When thou art alone in thy cell," says the ascetic teacher, "shut thy door, and seat thyself in a corner; raise thy mind above all things vain and transitory; recline thy beard and chin on thy breast; turn thy eyes and thy thoughts towards the middle of thy belly, the region of the navel, and search the place of the heart, the seat of the soul. At first all will be dark and comfortless; but, if you persevere day and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul discovered the place of the heart than it is involved in a mystic and ethereal light."