This act of the “negation of will” is the true characteristic of the saint, which finds its last completion in the absolute cessation of personal consciousness; and all consciousness must be personal and individual.  But the saints of Christianity, simple-minded and enveloped in the Jewish dogma as they were, could not see this, and their limited imagination looked upon that much-desired stage as the eternal continuation of a life, freed from nature.  Our judgment of the moral import of their resignation must not be influenced by this circumstance, for in reality they also longed for the cessation of their individual personality, i.e., of their existence.  But this deep longing is expressed more purely and more significantly in the most sacred and oldest religion of the human race, the doctrine of the Brahmins, and especially in its final transfiguration and highest perfection, Buddhism.  This also expounds the myth of a creation of the world by God, but it does not celebrate this act as a boon, but calls it a sin of Brahma which he, after having embodied himself in this world, must atone for by the infinite sufferings of this very world.  He finds his salvation in the saints who, by perfect negation of the “will of life,” by the sympathy with all suffering which alone fills their heart, enter the state of Nirwana, i.e., “the land of being no longer.”  Such a saint was Buddha.  According to his doctrine of the migration of souls every man is born again in the form of that creature on which he had inflicted pain, however pure his life might otherwise have been.  He himself must now know this pain, and his sorrowful migration does not cease, until during an entire course of his new-born life he has inflicted pain on no creature, but has denied his own will of life in the sympathy with other beings.  How sublime, how satisfying is this doctrine compared with the Judaeo-Christian doctrine, according to which a man (for, of course, the suffering animal exists for the benefit of man alone) has only to be obedient to the Church during this short life to be made comfortable for all eternity, while he who has been disobedient in this short life will be tortured for ever.  Let us admit that Christianity is to us this contradictory phenomenon, because we know it only in its mixture with, and distortion by, narrow-hearted Judaism, while modern research has succeeded in showing that pure and un-alloyed Christianity was nothing but a branch of that venerable Buddhism which, after Alexander’s Indian expedition, spread to the shores of the Mediterranean.  In early Christianity we still see distinct traces of the perfect negation of the “will of life,” of the longing for the destruction of the world, i.e., the cessation of all existence.  The pity is that this deeper insight into the essence of things can be gained alone by the abnormally organised men previously referred to, and that they only can fully grasp it.