nsions of the Christians against themselves:
"Prove to us," said the Lama, "that you are not Samaneans degenerated,
and that the man you make the author of your sect is not Fot himself
disguised. Prove to us by historical facts that he even existed at the
epoch you pretend; for, it being destitute of authentic testimony,* we
absolutely deny it; and we maintain that your very gospels are only the
books of some Mithriacs of Persia, and the Essenians of Syria, who were
a branch of reformed Samaneans."**

* There are absolutely no other monuments of the existence
of Jesus Christ as a human being, than a passage in Josephus
(Antiq. Jud. lib. 18, c.3,) a single phrase in Tacitus
(Annal. lib. 15, c. 44), and the Gospels. But the passage
in Josephus is unanimously acknowledged to be apocryphal,
and to have been interpolated towards the close of the third
century, (See Trad. de joseph, par M. Gillet); and that of
Tacitus in so vague and so evidently taken from the
deposition of the Christians before the tribunals, that it
may be ranked in the class of evangelical records. It
remains to enquire of what authority are these records.
"All the world knows," says Faustus, who, though a
Manichean, was one of the most learned men of the third
century, "All the world knows that the gospels were neither
written by Jesus Christ, nor his apostles, but by certain
unknown persons, who rightly judging that they should not
obtain belief respecting things which they had not seen,
placed at the head of their recitals the names of
contemporary apostles." See Beausob. vol. i. and Hist. des
Apologistes de la Relig. Chret. par Burigni, a sagacious
writer, who has demonstrated the absolute uncertainty of
those foundations of the Christian religion; so that the
existence of Jesus is no better proved than that of Osiris
and Hercules, or that of Fot or Beddou, with whom, says M.
de Guignes, the Chinese continually confound him, for they
never call Jesus by any other name than Fot. Hist. de Huns.

** That is to say, from the pious romances formed out of the
sacred legends of the mysteries of Mithra, Ceres, Isis,
etc., from whence are equally derived the books of the
Hindoos and the Bonzes. Our missionaries have long remarked
a striking resemblance between those books and the gospels.
M. Wil