and compassion for all living beings, not excepting even Dutch Governors, spare no pains to satisfy him by their answers. But the artless, naïve Atheism of these priests, whose piety extends even to practising continence, soon comes into conflict with the deep convictions founded on Judaism, imbibed by the Governor in his infancy. This faith has become a second nature for him; he cannot in the least understand that these priests are not Theists, therefore he constantly returns to his inquiries after a Supreme Being, asking them who created the world, and so forth. Whereupon they answer that there can be no higher being than Buddha Shakia-Muni, the Victorious and the Perfect, who, though a king's son by birth, voluntarily lived the life of a beggar, and preached to the end his sublime doctrine, for the Redemption of mankind, and for our salvation from the misery of constant renascence. They hold that the world has not been made by anyone[1] that it is self-created, that Nature spreads it out, and draws it in again; but that it is that, which existing, does not exist: that it is the necessary accompaniment of renascence, and that renascence is the result of our sinful conduct, &c. &c. &c. I mention such facts as these chiefly on account of the really scandalous way in which German savants still universally persist, even to the present day, in looking upon Religion and Theism as identical and synonymous; whereas Religion is, in fact, to Theism as the genus to the single species, and Judaism and Theism are alone identical. For this reason we stigmatize as heathen all nations who are neither Jews, Christians, nor Mahometans. Christians are even taxed by Mahometans and Jews with the impurity of their Theism, because of the dogma of the Trinity. For, whatever may be said to the contrary,
- ↑ Κόσμον τόνδε, φησίν Ηράκλειτος, ούτε τις θεῶν ούτε άνθρώπων ὲποίησεν. (Neither a God nor a man created this world, says Heraclitus.) Plut. "De animse procreatione," c. 5.
