the
world. This was a dangerous proceeding--dangerous because superficial,
dangerous because undertaken with a foregone conclusion; and very soon the
same arguments that had been used on one side in order to prove that all
religious truth had been derived from the Old Testament were turned
against Christian scholars and Christian missionaries, in order to show
that it was not Brahmanism and Buddhism which had borrowed from the Old
and New Testament, but that the Old and the New Testament had borrowed
from the more ancient religions of the Brahmans and Buddhists.

This argument was carried out, for instance, in Holwell's "Original
Principles of the Ancient Brahmans," published in London as early as 1779,
in which the author maintains that "the Brahmanic religion is the first
and purest product of supernatural revelation," and "that the Hindu
scriptures contain to a moral certainty the original doctrines and terms
of restoration delivered from God himself, by the mouth of his first
created Birmah, to mankind, at his first creation in the form of man."

Sir William Jones(48) tells us that one or two missionaries in India had
been absurd enough, in their zeal for the conversion of the Gentiles, to
urge "that the Hindus were even now almost Christians, because their
Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesa were no other than the Christian Trinity;" a
sentence in which, he adds, we can only doubt whether folly, ignorance, or
impiety predominates.

Sir William Jones himself was not likely to fall into that error. He
speaks against it most emphatically. "Either," he says, "the first eleven
chapters of Genesis--all due allowance being made for a figurative Eastern
style--are true, or the whole fabric of our national religion is false; a
conclusion which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn. But it is
not the truth of our national religion as such that I have at heart; it is
truth itself; and if any cool, unbiassed reasoner will clearly convince me
that Moses drew his narrative through Egyptian conduits from the primeval
fountains of Indian literature, I shall esteem him as a friend for having
weeded my mind from a capital error, and promise to stand amongst the
foremost in assisting to circulate the truth which he has ascertained."

But though he speaks so strongly against the uncritical proceedings of
those who would derive anything that is found in the Old Testament from
Indian sources, Sir William Jones himself was really guilty o