sonal, that if one could conceive that atheism should be finally demonstrated, not a proposition or a law in Buddhism would require on that account to be in the least modified. And yet, with practical unanimity, it is agreed that Buddhism must be accounted a religion; a fact which is the more significant that it is also among the most widely accepted of all religions.

It has been indeed rejoined to this, that Buddhism, nevertheless, however inconsistently, does recognise the being of a God. It is a fact that the Buddha himself is worshipped by many as a God; and that even in the earliest Buddhist authorities, the existence of the gods of Hindooism is taken for granted. As for the deification of the Buddha, however, it must be remembered that this did not belong to the original Buddhism, but is a very late development, which is even yet confined to the Northern school of Buddhism. The fact is indeed of great significance, in that it shows how impossible it is for a man to rest in a religion which does not present to him a personal object of worship; of worship; but shall we

therefore venture to say that until the Buddha was deified there was, properly speaking, no Buddhist religion? As for the recognition of the gods of the Hindoo pantheon, which we find in the primitive Buddhism, their position in Buddhism is so different from that which they have in Hindooism, that practically they retain but the name. The idea of the dependence of man upon the real or imaginary beings regarded as gods, which is essential to the conception of deity, and is found in all polytheistic religions, is absent from the Buddhist conception of the gods and their relation to man. The gods themselves might all be left out of Buddhism, and its general character would not thereby be affected. We must therefore still insist that while Buddhism, by general consent, is judged to be a religion, it is yet wholly destitute of any recognition of a God, or of gods, as standing in any necessary relation to mankind.

But if we must then reject the definitions above specially mentioned, as too narrow, because excluding by their terms such a widely accepted religion as this, we must reject also all others,

which, in like manner, either explicitly or implicitly, assume the recognition of a Deity, or of deities, as essential to religion. Such, for example, is that of Spinoza, that "religion is the love of God, founded on a knowledge of his Divine perfections"; or that of Kant, that religion essentially consists in "the recognition of our duties as Divine commandments"; or the closely similar definition of Fichte, that religion "is conscious morality; a morality which, in virtue of that consciousness, is mindful of its origin from God"; or, among the latest, that of Professor Reville, that "religion is the determination of human life by the sentiment of a bond uniting the human mind to that mysterious Mind whose domination of the world and of itself it recognises, and to whom it delights in feeling itself united." But in the orthodox Buddhism there is no recognition of a Divine Being who could give commandments, or whose will could be the origin of morality; and whereas the definition of Reville assumes both the existence of the human mind as distinct from the body, as also of a superior Mind,

manifest in the world, Buddhism, formally and in explicit terms, refuses to admit the existence of either.

Without multiplying illustrations of definitions. of this class, we may now glance at others which err in the opposite direction. Among the most extreme is that of Feuerbach, that religion is "man's worship of himself idealised"; the gods are "nothing but the wishes of men conceived as realised." The essence, therefore, of religion, consists in selfish desire. This thought has been elaborated by the positivist Gruppe, whose views have been set forth and effectively criticised by Professor Max Müller in his "Natural Religion." Religious belief is "a doctrine professing to be able to produce union with a Being or the attainment of a state which, properly speaking, lies beyond the sphere of human striving and attainment." Not only does Gruppe deny the universality of religion, and therefore its necessity in some form, but he ventures to maintain the astounding proposition that religion is a comparatively recent invention.

1

1 Op. cit. pp. 74-80.

Despite modern discoveries in Assyriology and Egyptology, he doubts if the existence of

religion can be

than 1000 B.C.

proven for any period earlier He supposes religion to have been an invention of some one, and its so general acceptance to have been due to three causes, namely: "the unconscious vanity of its founders, a belief in the happiness which it procures to its believers, and the substantial advantages which society derives from it."

The

To this theory that religion is in the last analysis a form of selfishness, we may reply that so to regard it, is to set at defiance alike. the general testimony of human consciousness and the most manifest facts of history. religion of millions is directly opposed to their selfishness, which it constantly condemns. Religion has, in fact, been the chief spring of whatever of unselfishness has brightened the history of our race. Nor even were the contrary assertion conceded, would it yet be explained how, even so, religion should have secured such universal acceptance. A man may be selfish in the highest degree, but he is not on that ac