The Rise and Progress of Buddhism in Europe may possibly form the subject of a long chapter in the hands of a Mosheim of the twentieth century. Hitherto, among all Western nations, not less than among the Jews, there has been a tolerable unanimous consensus that life, on the whole, is good, and that it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun. Happiness, like health, has been assumed to be the normal condition of sentient beings; and misery, like disease, to be exceptional and abnormal. The dead have been pitied, inasmuch as they had passed away from so pleasant a world; more especially so by those classic peoples who believed that the departed dwelt in an insubstantial realm of shadows. No energetic Northern race, however, contented itself with a twilight Hades, but built up in imagination a Valhalla of feast and war for the worshipper of Odin; and, for the disciple of the Druid, a glorious ascension from the darkness of “Abred” to the light and felicity of “Gwynfyd.” Christianity, in its perverted forms, Catholic ascetic and Calvinist, took away, indeed, much of the joyfulness of the old heathen world, and made divines speak of our earthly abode as a “city of wrath” or “vale of tears.” But they were all the more urgent that men should fight the good fight, of which the crown should be “_life_ everlasting” in the New Jerusalem; and, for the majority of their flocks, even if this sinful planet remained, it would appear at all times, a sufficiently desirable habitation to make departure from it unwelcome.