there were some (a few) who drank such pure water as the higher creed may offer to the most enlightened, thirsting soul. A personal, anthropomorphic God, an individual, personal, corporeal immortality, a half-militant faith in certain personal relations of the Teacher—these are keystones in the arch of Christian belief—not to be displaced by the most generalising mind that would still call itself faithful. And most helpful are they to the spirit of lower flight, just rising from the earth, building its resting-place with familiar concrete material.
Even the frightful vision of hell which, wonderfully enough, was not expelled from the compassionate dreams of Christ, would stimulate rather than destroy the faith of those who, in gusty barbarism, had sought the extremes of punishment for their enemies, and had imagined their dead as still on horseback, still fighting some undying foe. Gratified with the hope of a happy resurrection of the body for himself, the zealous saint felt urged by childish reason, as well as by inspiration, to construct for the unfaithful sinner an eternal bodily punishment, equal in its kind with the felicity promised to himself. Surely these are easier steeps to climb, for untutored minds, than the ascent to Buddha's heights. Here, there is no God, only an unnamed, infinite, hence undefined, principle of creation. The universe is bound in absolute law. Separate existence is bound up, under the invariable law, with desire, and desire with evil ; death is a portal, opening, first, to another life, whose evil will be proportioned to the desire that has raged in this ; through successive deaths life is led to Nirvana,
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