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276 and benevolent soul, there was something anomalous in all this. Gautama of the Sakya race was versed in the Hindu learning and religion of the age, but he pondered and asked if what he had learnt could be efficacious or true. His soul rebelled against the distinctions between man and man; and his benevolent heart longed for a means to help the humble, the oppressed, and the lowly. The ceremonials and rites which householders practised appeared as vain and fruitless to him as the penances and mortifications which hermits voluntarily underwent in forests. The beauty of a holy and a sinless life of benevolence became to him as the perfection of human destiny, and with the earnest conviction of a prophet and a reformer he proclaimed this as the essence of religion, inviting the poor and lowly to end their sufferings by cultivating virtue, by eschewing passions and evil desire, and by spreading brotherly love and universal peace. The Brahman and the Sudra, the high and the low, were the same in his eyes; each and all could effect their salvation by a holy life, and he invited every man to embrace his creed of love. Mankind responded to the appeal, and Buddhism in the course of a few centuries became the prevailing faith, not of a sect or a country, but of the continent of Asia.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suppose that Gautama Buddha consciously set himself up as the founder of a new religion. On the contrary, he believed to the last that he was proclaiming only the pure and ancient religion which had prevailed among the