When there is a person who considers Jesus Christ as his teacher, who feels that although there may be great ones or less great ones, there is only one to whom all is due, all love and all devotion, it is not his fault; it is his religion. By pulling down his ideal, what do we gain? There are others who will say that Buddha is the greatest teacher of all, and if one were to say to such a person, “You are wrong”, one would not do any good to those Buddhists. One would help them more by allowing them to keep their belief, for behind Buddha, as behind Christ, there is one Spirit of Guidance.

One day I met a girl who was working in a factory. She was uneducated, but she had such a devotion and love for Jesus Christ that it was the only thing she lived for. Of course she had never read any books on philosophy or religion. Now, the manager of this factory was a man whose thought had been saturated with many abstruse ideas. Recently he had read a book which said that Jesus Christ was only an ideal but not a historical person; that he had never existed. In his enthusiasm about this new idea he wanted to talk with somebody about it, and he happened to speak to this girl. And listening to this idea shocked the girl so much that she cried for days on end, thinking that her whole religion was shattered to pieces, that there was nothing anymore for her to live for. Then a friend of hers, seeing her so unhappy, brought her to me, and when I had told her differently from what the manager had said there was no end to her happiness; her soul was again full of the joy she had lost. Belief came back to her, and with it her love and devotion. She needed the ideal of devotion to be able to go on in life, and when it was broken by a stranger it upset her completely.