The church was too pure to be led astray by the libertinism of the latter class of heresiarchs. The time had not yet come for the former, and men who, in the thirteenth century, might perhaps have founded powerful orders, and have been reverenced by the Christian world as new incarnations of Christ, were, through their anachronism, stigmatized as heretics, and expelled from the communion of the faithful. Still, their religious fervor and rigorous virtue had a gradually increasing influence in stimulating the development of the ascetic principle, if not in the acknowledged dogmas, at all events, in the practice of the church, as may be seen when, towards the close of the second century, Dionysius of Corinth finds himself obliged to reprove Pinytus, Bishop of Gnosus, for endeavoring to render celibacy compulsory among his flock, to the manifest danger of those whose virtue was less austere.[36] In all this, unquestionably, the ascetic ideas of the East had much to do, and these were chiefly represented by Buddhism, which, since the reign of Asoka, in the third century B.C., had been the dominant religion of India. A curious allusion in St. Jerome to Buddha’s having been born of a virgin,[37] shows a familiarity with details of Buddhist belief which presupposes a general knowledge of that faith; and though the divinized Maya, wife of Suddhodana, is not absolutely described as a virgin in eastern tradition, yet she and her husband had taken a vow of continence before Buddha, from the Tushita heaven, to fulfil his predestined salvation of mankind and establishment of the kingdom of righteousness, had selected her as the vehicle of his incarnation. Much in the legend of his birth, of the miracles which attended it, of his encounter with the Tempter, and other details of his life, is curiously suggestive of the source whence sprang the corresponding legend of the life of Christ, more particularly as related in the pseudo-gospels.[38] Not only this, but many of the observances of Latin Christianity can scarce be explained save by derivation from Buddhism, such as monasticism, the tonsure, the use of rosaries, confession, penance, and absolution, the sign of the cross, relic-worship, and miracles wrought by relics, the purchase of salvation by gifts to the church, pilgrimages to sacred places, etc. etc. Even the nimbus which in sacred art surrounds the head of holy personages, is to be found in the sculptures of the Buddhist Topes, and the Sangreal, or Holy Cup of the Last Supper, which was the object of lifelong quest by the Christian knight, is but the Patra or begging-dish of Buddha, which was the subject of many curious legends.[39] It is no wonder that when the good Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth century found among the heathen of Asia so much of what they were familiar with at home, they could not decide whether it was the remains of a preëxisting Catholicism, or whether Satan, to