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The personality of the Buddha invites comparison with the founders of the other world-religions, Christ and Mohammed. We are tempted to ask too if there is any resemblance between him and Confucius, a contemporary Asiatic whose influence has been equally lasting, but here there is little common ground. For Confucius's interest was mainly in social and ethical problems, not in religion.
This proves that it was not the first ancestor who became God, in the belief of his descendants, but much rather the Divine Maker and Beginner of all, who, in the creed of his adorers, became the first ancestor. Our task has been limited, in this way, mainly to examination of the religion of some of the very lowest races, and of the highest world-religions, such as Judaism.
If the Augean stables of the materialism that is so prevalent in the religion, philosophy and science of to-day, are to be cleansed, the spiritual sources of the world-religions can alone be effectual for their cleansing, but these are at present hidden by the rocks and overgrowth of dogma and ignorance.
Feuerbach's declaration that the periods of man's development are only differentiated through changes in religion is false. Great historical points of departure are coincident with religious changes only as far as the three world-religions which exist up to the present are concerned Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.
Such analogies as these can be found, however, in any of the world-religions, and we propose to devote our attention more particularly to the influences which Christianity and Islam exerted directly upon one another. While Muhammedanism has borrowed from its hereditary foe, it has also repaid part of the debt.
While Christianity has thus been brought to the level of a natural religion, its old-time adversaries, the other world-religions such as Buddhism, Brahmanism, Islamism, have been shown by sympathetic students to be vast upward essays of mankind toward truth and goodness.
The declaration that great historical revolutions are accompanied by religious changes is declared by Engels not to be true, except in a limited degree as regards the three great world-religions Christianity, Mahommedanism and Buddhism.
In the first place, as regards these more or less artificial world-religions, particularly in the cases of Christianity and Mohammedanism, we find that the more universal historical movements will take on a religious stamp, and as far as concerns Christianity in particular, the stamp of the religion affecting revolutionary movements of universal significance stopped short at the commencement of the fight of the bourgeois for emancipation from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and showed itself not as Feuerbach declares in the hearts of men and the thirst for religion, but in the entire earlier history of the Middle Ages which knew no other form of idealism than religion and theology.
There are many, it may be added, who find it a matter of consolation that in following the natural and rational path in this matter they are not thereby altogether breaking with the religious traditions of their race. It is scarcely necessary to remark that when we turn from Christianity to the other great world-religions, we do not usually meet with so ambiguous an attitude towards sex.
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