The answers of the various religions of the world are all of the nature of guesses, and are unsupported by proven fact. Hinduism says that all life is an emanation from the divine existence; the creative power is ever emitting, ever reabsorbing, individual lives; it alone is; all else is mâya, illusion. Hence the reverence shown to all living things by the Brahmin; he will not slay the lowest creature, since it shares with him the divine essence, and all the forms with which the deity clothes itself are to him sacred.
Buddhism sees life as a state of unrest, each individual life passing through a circle of changes so long as it continues imperfect; the life rises through stage after stage, or if unworthy in one stage it is degraded to a lower for its next probation; at length, becoming perfect, it passes into Nirvana, is absorbed into the All. To escape from life's unrest, from the circle of existence, is the aim of the Buddhist philosopher; the unruffled serenity of unconsciousness is his goal; the loss of the One in the All is the hope on which his world-weary eyes are fixed.
These mystic Oriental religions are profoundly Pantheistic; one life pulsing through all living things; one existence bodying itself forth in all individual existences; such is the common ground of those mighty religions which number among their adherents the vast majority of human kind. And in this magnificent conception they are in accord with modern science; the philosopher and the poet, with the far-reaching glance of genius, caught sight of that unity of all things, "the One in the Many" of Plato, a belief which it is the glory of modern science to have placed upon the sure foundation of ascertained fact.
Hebraism, a growth so curiously crude when regarded in the light of the elaborated creeds of the surrounding cults, had no idea of this grandiose view of human life. To it the value of life lay in life's pleasures. The joy of a man in a woman, not in the woman but in the sex alone; the delight in wine and flesh, in overbrimming treasure-bin, in "basket and store"; the pride of laden orchard and golden heads of corn; the gladness in the autumn ripening, and in the gathering for the winepress, and in the foaming torrent of the trodden fruit; all these—glad and beautiful truly as they are, but not the greatest gladness or the fairest beauty of human life—were to the Hebrew the one thing needful, the sign of the favor of the Most
