B

“Was not nirvana “only the sleep eternal in an eternal night”? A heaven without a God, immortality without a soul, and purification without prayer sum up his doctrine. T. H. Huxley finds hope in the fact that

a system which knows no God in the Western sense, which denies a soul to man, which counts the belief in immortality a blunder and the hope of it a sin, which refuses any efficacy to prayer and sacrifice, which binds men to look to nothing but their own efforts for salvation, which in its original purity knew nothing of vows of obedience and never sought the aid of the secular arm, yet spread over a considerable moiety of old world with marvellous rapidity, is still, with whatever base admixture of foreign superstitions, the dominant creed of a large fraction of mankind.”