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found no sense of comfort or permanent satisfaction in his own immunity from want and sorrow. He pondered long upon the way to become freed from the "successive round of births and deaths," and thus pondering, he sought solitude in which to find his questions answered.

Fasting and penance have ever been the gist of the instruction given to those who would "find the way to God," and so to this end Gautama fasted and prayed, and practised self-sacrifice.

But the attainment of liberation was not easy, and Siddhartha suffered long and practiced self-mortification assiduously, at length being rewarded; and "there arose within him the eye to perceive the great and noble truths which had been handed down; the knowledge of their nature; the understanding of their cause; the wisdom that lights the true path; the light that expels darkness."

The terrible struggle which characterized the attainment of cosmic consciousness, by so many of the sages and saviours of history, is, we believe, clue to the fact that no one individual may hope to rise so immeasurably above the plane of the race-consciousness of his day and age, except through intense and overwhelming desire.

Gautama abandoned his heritage, his relatives, his wife to whom he was devoted, and his infant son, as we have previously stated, not because