If we die in our sins, we shall be obliged to live again on the earth; and it will not be, perhaps, till after many lives that the necessity for fresh births will be exhausted.

But when we have attained perfection, the evil spell is broken; and '_then the wise man_,' it is said, '_is extinguished as this lamp_.' The highest life was one of seclusion and asceticism.

The founder of Buddhism was met, during his first preaching, with the objection that his system, if carried out fully, would be the ruin and the extermination of humanity.

And he did not deny the charge; but said that what his questioners called ruin, was in reality the highest good.
It is then hard to conceive an appeal more singularly infelicitous than that which our modern positivists make to Buddhism.

It is the appeal of optimists to inveterate pessimists, and of exact thinkers to inveterate mystics.