Now observe a contrast in the answers given. To Gautama, the Buddha, the existence not merely of selfishness, but of the self, is a fundamental evil, delusion, and source of misery; and the true blessedness of painless peace is only to be attained by the emptying out of all desire, the extinction of all clinging to existence, and so at last by the extinction of life or personality itself. Thus though the Buddha’s moral teaching has many beautiful resemblances to that of our Lord, it has this fundamental difference, that Buddha regarded personal existence as a delusion and an evil to be got rid of, but Christ as a supreme truth and good to be at last realized in the vision of God and the fruition of eternal life. “I came that they may have life and may have it abundantly.” Again, Aristotle asked the question, What is the blessed life? and he came to the conclusion that the life truly worth living was possible only for very few men. It was impossible for slaves, because they were the mere tools of other men; or for the diseased, because they were necessarily miserable; or for paupers, because they had not a sufficiency of this world’s goods; or for those dying young, because they had not time enough to realize true blessedness. Observe, I say, the contrast in all this. Christ lays the blessed life open to all. And why? Because he takes a man at once up to God: He centres his life on God: He puts him in full view of God as the goal of life: He bases life on God as a foundation. Again, as a consequence of this, He calculates life――as a life lived in God must be calculated――on the scale of eternity. Grant these two things――that each human life may be based on God and calculated on the scale of eternity――and you get rid of all the limitations which made Aristotle declare that neither the slave, nor the diseased, nor the poor, nor those who die young, can live the blessed life. Thus our Lord has described the character of true blessedness as belonging to man as man, to all men if they will have it, simply by the recognition of their true relation to God. From that point of view all accidents of life fade away into insignificance. They give, indeed, its special character to each life, and the conditions of its probation, but they cannot touch its true blessedness.