But history is history; and a French writer has recently attacked Christ for attempting to bring into Europe the celibacy and pessimism of Buddhism. This author in his work, "Jésus Bouddha," cites Luke xiv. 26:--
"If any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and _wife_, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple."
"Think not that I have come to send peace on earth: I come not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household." (Matt. x. 34-36.)
"And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child; and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death." (_Ibid._ ver. 21.)
"So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke xiv. 33).
The author says that all this is pure nihilism, and Essene communism. "The most sacred family ties are to be renounced, and man to lose his individuality and become a unit in a vast scheme to overturn the institutions of his country."
"Qu' importe au fanatisme la ruine de la societé humaine."
"The anticosmic tendency of the Christian doctrine," says Mr. Felix Oswald ("Secret of the East," p. 27), "distinguishes it from all religions except Buddhism. In the language of the New Testament the 'world' is everywhere a synonym of evil and sin, the flesh everywhere the enemy of the spirit.... The Gospel of Buddha, though a pernicious, is, however, a perfectly consistent doctrine. Birth, life, and re-birth is an eternal round of sorrow and disappointment. The present and the future are but the upper and lower tire of an ever-rolling wheel of woe. The only salvation from the wheel of life is an escape to the peace of Nirvâna. The attempt to graft this doctrine upon the optimistic theism of Palestine has made the Christian ethics inconsistent and contradictory. A paternal Jehovah who yet eternally and horribly tortures a vast plurality of his children. An earth the perfect work of a benevolent God, yet a vale of tears not made to be enjoyed, but only to be despised and renounced. An omnipotent heaven, and yet unable to prevent the intrigues and constant victories of hell. Christianity is evidently not a homogeneous but a composite, a hybrid religion; and considered in connection with the indications of history, and the evidence of the above-named ethical and traditional analogies, these facts leave no reasonable doubt that the founder of the Galilean Church was a disciple of Buddha Sakyamuni." (p. 139.)