[2]This great and fundamental truth, lying as the basis of human action
and responsibility, was recognized by Homer, who makes Jupiter say:
"Perverse mankind, whose wills created free,
Charge all their woes to absolute decree."
Odyssey, Book I, lines 41 and 42
[3]After examining the attempted explanations of that remarkable
passage, the original of which is given at the end of the sixth book of
Arnold's "Light of Asia," I am satisfied this is its true
interpretation. It is not the death of the body, for he lived
forty-five years afterwards, much less the annihilation of the soul, as
some have imagined, but the conquest of the passions and gross and
selfish desires which make human life a prison, the very object and end
of the highest Christian teaching's and aspirations.
[4] "Know then that heaven and earth's compacted frame,
And flowing waters, and the starry flame,
And both the radiant lights, one common soul
Inspires and feeds and animates the whole."
Dryden's Virgil, Book VI, line 360.
[5]Buddha predicted that Matreya (Love incarnate) would be his
successor (see Beal's Fa Hian, page 137, note 2, and page 162; also
Hardy's Manual, page 386, and Oldenburgh's Buddhism, page 386), who was
to come at the end of five hundred years at the end of his Dharma (see
Buddhism and Christianity, Lillie, page 2).
It is a remarkable fact that this successor is the most common object
of worship among Buddhists, so that the most advanced Buddhists and the
most earnest Christians have the same object of worship under different
names.
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