ries before Christ?

And, again, while there is no reason to suppose that Christian
missionaries in the early centuries of the era made any appreciable
impression on India or China, there is good reason to suppose that the
Buddhists, who were the first and most successful of all missionaries,
reached Egypt and Persia and Palestine, and made their influence felt.

I now turn to the statement of M. Burnouf, quoted by Mr. Lillie. M.
Burnouf asserts that the Indian origin of Christianity is no longer
contested:

It has been placed in full light by the researches of scholars,
and notably English scholars, and by the publication of the
original texts... In point of fact, for a long time folks had
been struck with the resemblances--or, rather, the identical
elements--contained in Christianity and Buddhism. Writers
of the firmest faith and most sincere piety have admitted them.
In the last century these analogies were set down to the
Nestorians; but since then the science of Oriental chronology
has come into being, and proved that Buddha is many years
anterior to Nestorius and Jesus. Thus the Nestorian theory
had to be given up. But a thing may be posterior to another
without proving derivation. So the problem remained unsolved
until recently, when the pathway that Buddhism followed was
traced step by step from India to Jerusalem.

There was baptism before Christ, and before John the Baptist. There were
gods, man-gods, son-gods, and saviours before Christ. There were Bibles,
hymns, temples, monasteries, priests, monks, missionaries, crosses,
sacraments, and mysteries before Christ.

Perhaps the most important sacrament of the Christian religion to-day is
the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper. But this idea of the Eucharist, or the
ceremonial eating of the god, has its roots far back in the prehistoric
days of religious cannibalism. Prehistoric man believed that if he ate
anything its virtue passed into his physical system. Therefore he began
by devouring his gods, body and bones. Later, man mended his manners so
far as to substitute animal for human sacrifice; still later he employed
bread and wine as symbolical substitutes for flesh and blood. This is
the origin and evolution of the strange and, to many of us, repulsive
idea of eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ.

Now, supposing these facts to be as I have stated them above, to what
conclu