ted. Why
should the adroit Porphyry attempt to work up a few mere scraps of
resemblance from the life of Pythagoras, when all he had to do was to
lay his hand upon familiar legends which afforded an abundance of the
very thing in demand?

Again, it is to be remembered that Christianity has always been
restrictive and opposed to admixtures with other systems. It repelled
the Neo-Platonism of Alexandria, and it fought for two or three
centuries against Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and similar heresies: and the
assumption, in the face of all this, that the Christian Church went out
of its way to copy Indian Buddhism, must be due either to gross
ignorance or to reckless misrepresentation. On the other hand, it is in
accordance with the very genius of Buddhism to borrow. It has absorbed
every indigenous superstition and entered into partnership with every
local religious system, from the Devil Worship of Burmah and Ceylon to
the Taouism of China and the Shinto of Japan. In its long-continued
contact with Christianity it has changed from the original atheism of
Gautama to various forms of theism, and in some of its sects, at least,
from a stanch insistance on self-help alone to an out-and-out doctrine
of salvation by faith. This is true of the Shin and Yodo sects of
Japan. From recognizing no God at all at first, Buddhism had, by the
seventh century A.D., a veritable Trinity, with attributes resembling
those of the Triune God of the Christians, and by the tenth century it
had five trinities with One Supreme Adi-Buddha over them all. Everyone
may judge for himself whether these later interpolations of the system
were borrowed from the New Testament Trinity, which had been proclaimed
through all the East ten centuries before. Buddhism is still absorbing
foreign elements through the aid of its various apologists. Sir Edwin
Arnold has greatly added to the force of its legend by the Christian
phrases and Christian conceptions which he has read into it. Toward the
close of the "Light of Asia" he also introduces into the Buddha's sermon
at Kapilavastu the teachings of Herbert Spencer and others of our own
time.

But altogether the most stupendous improbability lies against the whole
assumption that Christ and his followers based their "essential
doctrines" on the teachings of the Buddha. The early Buddhism was
atheistic: this is the common verdict of Davids, Childers, Sir Monier
Williams, Kellogg, and many others. The Buddha declared