I am constantly turning back to a thought that I have passed by. Let me now return to the consideration of Buddhism as a religion. It is evident that, viewed on this side, Buddhism is one thing to the initiated, another to the masses. So was the religion of the Romans, so is Christianity. It is necessarily so. No two persons receive the formal creed of the same church in the same way. The man of higher grade, and the man of lower, cannot understand things in the same sense because they have not the same faculties for understanding. Hence the polytheism among those called Buddhists. There could be no such thing among the initiated. Religion, then, like everything else, is subject to growth. Such must be the Buddhist doctrine. If, then, Buddhism, or the philosophy which bears that name, originated with the fourth root-race of men, does it not occur to the initiated that the fifth race ought, by this same theory, to develop a higher form of truth? Looking at the matter merely on its intellectual side, ought not the higher development of the power of thought to bring truer conceptions of the highest things? Again, a query: Is the rise of the Brahmo-Somaj a step toward the practical extension of Christianity into the domain of Buddhism?
This brings to discussion the whole question of the work done by missionary effort among the lower races. I do not mean the question whether we should try to Christianize them, but what result is it reasonable to expect. And here I imagine that there is a strict limit, beyond which it is impossible for the members of a given race to be developed. On the Buddhist principle, given a certain human being, and we have a human soul passing through a definite stage of its progress. While it occupies its present body it is, except, our author always says, in very peculiar cases, incapable of more than a certain advance,--as incapable as a given species of animal, or tree, or even as the body of the man itself is incapable of more than a certain growth. I think that any one who has studied or observed the processes of ordinary school training, must have been sometimes convinced that he has in hand a boy whose ability to be further advanced has come to an end. Sometimes we find a boy who will come forward with the greatest promise; but, at a certain point, although goodwill is not lacking, the growth seems to be arrested. The biologist will explain this as due to the physical character of the brain. The Buddhist affirms, that when that human soul last came from the oblivion which closes the Devachanic state, it chose unconsciously, but by natural affinity, out of all the possible conditions and circumstances of mortal life, that embryonic human body, for which its spiritual condition rendered it fit.