Sakya Muni, a teacher only second in nobility of character to
Jesus, who, like him, proclaimed a system of elevated morality, has even
now almost twice the number of followers, although his missionaries
never sought converts in the West. [168:1] Considered as a scheme
Divinely devised as the best, if not only, mode of redeeming the human
race and saving them from eternal damnation, promulgated by God himself
incarnate in human form, and completed by his own actual death upon the
cross for the sins of the world, such results as these can only be
regarded as practical failure, although they may not be disproportionate
for a system of elevated morality.
We shall probably never be able to determine how far the great Teacher
may through his own speculations or misunderstood spiritual utterances
have suggested the supernatural doctrines subsequently attributed to
him, and by which his whole history and system soon became transformed;
but no one who attentively studies the subject can fail to be struck by
the absence of such dogmas from the earlier records of his teaching. It
is to the excited veneration of the followers of Jesus, however, that we
owe most of the supernatural elements so characteristic of the age and
people. We may look in vain even in the synoptic Gospels for the
doctrines elaborated in the Pauline Epistles and the Gospel of Ephesus.
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