586  BUDDHISM.
yielded  so  readily  that  a  few  centuries  seem  to  have
sufficed  to  give  the  latter  religion  the  control  of
Northern  India.
The  social  sympathies  cannot  be  abolished.  Under
Reaction  to  whatever  national  or  climatic  conditions,  prac-
universaiity.  tical  democratic  instincts  will  make  themselves
heard.  No  race  nor  religion  has  the  monopoly  of
forces  so  essential  to  the  justification  of  human  nature.
To  some  vigorous  spirit  the  abstract  truths  of  contem-
plation will  become  forces  of  his  own  active  realism  :
they  will  become  hands  and  feet,  and  demand  to  be
used.  Organized  into  his  moral  being,  these  medita-
tions, these  divine  dreams,  carry  him  straightway  out
of  his  spiritual  cell,  to  say  to  the  whole  world :
What  is  mine  is  yours  also  :  the  great  all-reconciling
light  that  shone  down  to  me  on  the  mountain-top,  in
the  desert  stillness,  in  the  night  of  self-abandonment
to  the  best,  this  was  not  for  me,  it  was  for  all  mankind.
Then  the  spiritual  aristocracy  has  to  learn  that  the
truths  it  was  hoarding  are  greater  than  itself;  that
they  refuse  its  patronage  and  custody,  and  go  home
to  the  universal  heart.  It  has  to  deal  as  it  best  can,
even  in  these  finer  and  subtler  spheres  of  thought,
with  democratic  reform.
That  a  practical,  humanitarian  spirit  has  been  the
natural  outgrowth  of  mystical  and  pantheistic  devo-
tion has  been  already  noted  in  previous  pages  of  this
volume.  In  Brahmanical  history,  this  justification,  so
early  and  rapid  that  it  indicates  the  great  strength  of
these  elements  in  the  Hindu  mind,  was  Buddhism.
And  Comparative  Religion  hardly  affords  a  more  in-
teresting study  than  the  process  by  which  its  health-
ful reaction  struggled  forth  out  of  the  abyss  of  abstract
ideas  and  ascetic  disciplines.
