commonplace it is not a glimmer of insight beyond what has been dinned into our ears for years past by commonplace travellers, missionaries, and men of many grades of scholarship, and the reverse.

The essence of Sakya Muni's teaching was that every one should strive to be good in thought, word, and deed; that by so doing he would be born to a better and happier life in the next birth. But he taught that those who were truly wise would also seek to attain a higher object namely, the deliverance of the soul from the chain of transmigrations. This, he maintained, could only be affected by leading the life of a religious mendicant; by rooting out every affection, passion, or desire; by severing every tie that bound the soul to the universe of being. When that end was accomplished, the soul would be detached from all life and being; it would be delivered or emancipated from the endless chain of transmigrations, and would finally sink into an eternal sleep or annihilation known as Nirvana.

Which is a caput mortuum. It is, we think demonstrable that, in spite of vagueness of terms what Nirvana meant was not at all annihilation, but identity with the Divine. If Mr. Wheeler had said that Buddha's desires were to escape from the miseries of life, which had been intensified by the ceaseless round of Brahmanic ceremonies, through the truly moral life that demanded a mystical basis, in spite of a determination not to recognise it, he would, we think, have come nearer the truth in a

few words than he has done in his many words; and if he had brought out clearly how, notwithstanding the intense strain of mysticism in Buddha himself, his teaching to his followers ever turned on practical duties, he would, in a word, have more effectively indicated than he has done the eternal value of his Gospel. Jesus Christ said that the man who preferred father and mother to him was not worthy of Him. Buddha said that to obey father and mother was better than to serve the gods of heaven and earth; and the approach of the two forms of teaching at the transcendental point is far closer than might be believed. The words of Christ asserting a continued identity-“I and the Father are one" on one side touch, we may without irreverence say, the same side of the mystical ideal as that after which Buddha strove. Nirvana is constantly opposed to Sansara — the realm of change, illusion, coming and going. When Boehme said, "The man to whom eternity is as time, and time is as eternity, he is above all strife," had in his mind the identical thought. We ought not to isolate Nirvana, and view it apart from what was always held in contrast with it in Buddha's mind. In Nirvana was rest and stillness, and also simplicity and unity. These are the elements of a

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complete and ideal life the perfection of sensibility and thought, not of death and nothingness. Transmigration was of the essence of the Brahmanic creed; Buddhism proclaims a close to transmigration, and reasserts the soul as soul. So long as the soul can be reborn, it can die; to assert a point beyond which there was no rebirth was Buddha's way of again proclaiming immortality, pure and simple. A transmigration for individual existence was thus annihilated only in so far as it was dependent on evil or sensuous desires. Buddha held that Nirvana could be attained here; and so our Saviour said, "The kingdom of God is within you." As for God, it would take a whole article to make clear Buddha's idea; but Nirvana was simply a re-union with Him.

Some close students of the development of thought in India have found in ideas like these the general solution of difficulties otherwise insurmountable in its progress from stage to stage, and one of them, to whom we must own indebtedness, has generally set forth thus the elementary conditions for any kind of interior comprehension of Brahminism and Buddhism :

"In India the march of inquiry was directed by two impulses the search for a unifying, for an

all-simplifying, principle, and the yearning to escape from transmigration, from the ceaseless series of re-embodiments, and all the miseries that waited the soul in birth after birth. The progress was qualified by the necessity of absorbing the earlier order of conceptions, of finding a place for the ancient theological imagery. The conciliation was effected by declaring that the gods and their worship belonged to the unreal, to the transmigratory fieri or illusory spheres of pleasure and pain, but yet that worship was the necessary preliminary of real Knowledge, as the only means of purifying the intellect of the aspirant for the reception of the truth. Let these three momenta of the Indian speculative procedure be carried in mind, and the reader will have no difficulty in understanding the complex texture of Indian cosmogonies." *

We firmly believe there is something to be said for such a view, without in the least straining Buddha's words; but Mr. Wheeler's theory takes no note of the possibility of interpretation in this direction, and though his book is, on the whole, fitted to be useful, and to supply a want, it might have been thus far better, more sympathetic and more comprehensive.

The Philosophy of the Upanishads," by A. E. Gough, in "Calcutta Review," 1878, page 1.

GEORGE HERBERT'S LOVE OF NATURE,

WHAT relation has passion and breadth of human nature to love of Nature in the modern sense? We are not aware of any very exact and satisfactory attempt to answer the question. It is noticeable, certainly, in the case of what may be called the communicative lover of nature-typified to us in such men as Ruskin and Thoreau-that we have a certain coldness or bloodlessness along with great enthusiasm and incapacity to find full enjoyment in Nature apart from some form of selfexpression. But love of Nature in its last phase should promote reticence. Ruskin and Thoreau differ in much : Thoreau, it is true, seemed to have great reserve and self-restraint, where Ruskin seems to have little; but that may only be seeming; for measures of self-control are very difficult

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