xvi. 19) of the rich man and Lazarus given, which nowhere mentions any

fault of the former or any merit of the latter, and takes as the standard of the future recompense, not the good done or the wickedness practised, but the evil suffered here and the good things enjoyed, in the Ebionite spirit. “A like estimation of outward poverty,” Strauss goes on, “is also attributed to Jesus by the other synoptists (Matt. xix. 16; Mark x. 17; Luke xviii. 18), in the story of the rich young man and the saying about the camel and the eye of a needle.”

If we go to the bottom of the matter we will recognise that even in the most famous passages of the Sermon on the Mount there is contained an indirect injunction to voluntary poverty, and thereby to the denial of the will to live. For the precept (Matt. v. 40 _seq._) to consent unconditionally to all demands made upon us, to give our cloak also to him who will take away our coat, &c., similarly (Matt. vi. 25‐34) the precept to cast aside all care for the future, even for the morrow, and so to live simply in the present, are rules of life the observance of which inevitably leads to absolute poverty, and which therefore just say in an indirect manner what Buddha directly commands his disciples and has confirmed by his own example: throw everything away and become bhikkhu, _i.e._, beggars. This appears still more decidedly in the passage Matt. x. 9‐15, where all possessions, even shoes and a staff, are forbidden to the Apostles, and they are directed to beg. These commands afterwards became the foundation of the mendicant order of St. Francis (_Bonaventuræ vita S. Francisci_, c. 3). Hence, then, I say that the spirit of Christian ethics is identical with that of Brahmanism and Buddhism. In conformity with the whole view expounded here Meister Eckhard also says (Works, vol. i. p. 492): “The swiftest animal that bears thee to perfection is suffering.”