"By his side another figure. He is simple, natural. He is a stranger to the learning of books. Out of the profound, untaught impulses of his soul he speaks.... His doctrines are the simple utterances of a fatherhood which embosoms all the children of men, and a brotherhood which makes all the races of the world one great family.... All nations respond to his mystical utterances about heaven and earth.... His self-immersed air, absent eyes ... which show that his spirit is far, far away, point him out to be the Prophet of the East, the sweet Jesus of the Galilean lake.
"Throughout the whole Eastern world the perfume of his faith and devotion has spread. The wild genius of Mohammed knew and adored him amid the sands of Arabia. The tender, love-intoxicated soul of Hafiz revelled in the sweetness of Christ's piety amid the rosebuds and nightingales of Persia. Look at this picture and upon that.... When we speak of an Eastern Christ we speak of the incarnation of unbounded love and grace; and when we speak of a Western Christ, we speak of the incarnation of theology, formalism, ethical, and physical force. Christ, we know, is neither of the East nor of the West; but men have localized what God meant to make universal."
Happily there is no need to substantiate the fact of the immense consolations derived by humanity from the Christian mode of regarding the past, the present, and the future, with all its dazzling possibilities, in the direction of a New Jerusalem; but it must, indeed, seem strange to those nurtured amid Christian influences that a religious system such as Buddhism, which does not recognize a God or Soul or Immortality in the Occidental sense of these terms, should claim to have as its product that _cœur léger_ temperament which is said to be, and to have been, the distinctive characteristic of its countless adherents.
When the mind wanders afar from the dogmatic of the scholiast, the life of Jesus presents itself with a dramatic force of loveliness and grandeur which, of its kind, cannot be surpassed; and the poetic pathos of the New Testament, though not so resonant as that to be found in the pages of such works as Job and the Prophets, possesses a pastoral charm of its own at once soothing and stimulating.