We will not, however, content ourselves with this short notice, but will first inquire whether, if the accounts of the earlier reporters, Eusebius, Socrates, Clement, and Rufinus, who wrote about a.d. 320, 390, 190, and 370, are not to be trusted, we can believe the stories of Gregory Nazianzen, Ambrose, Jerome, Nicephorus, and Abdias, who wrote about a.d. 380, 380, 400, 815, and 910 respectively. If we believe one set of Christian "fathers," that Thomas the apostle died in Syria, we cannot credit a set of Christian "sons," who affirm that he was martyred in India. But--and the point is an important one--we can see reason why the children should invent an account of which the parents saw not the necessity. About the period of Gregory Nazianzen arose that asceticism which sent Simeon Stylites upon the top of his pillar in a.d. 394, and kept him there for the rest of his life, and that peopled the Thebaid with hermits of the most approved Buddhist order--celibates shunning luxury, and cultivating filthiness of the outer to cleanse the inner man. The way in which the original faith, preached by Jesus and modified by Paul, was distorted during the first few centuries in Egypt can only be rationally accounted for by a spread of Buddhist doctrines by Indian missionaries, or promulgated by Christian merchants, who had travelled to the Indies, and modified their original faith by what they saw and heard from the followers of the great Sramana; and it was natural for the Alexandrian Christians to adopt the modifications referred to, and to stamp the innovations with the assertion that they were apostolic reflections--rays of divine light falling from "the sun of righteousness" upon the mind of the blessed Saint Somebody, Thomas, for this purpose, being a name which answered as well as any other. There is positively no evidence whatever--except some apocryphal Jesuit stories about certain disciples of Jesus, found by Papal missionaries at Malabar--that any disciple of Mary's son ever proceeded to Hindostan to preach the gospel during the first centuries of our era. Those who know the history of the "Decretals," and of Prester John, can readily estimate the value of tales told by Jesuits in India, where there was not at the time anyone to test their veracity. Being myself desirous of ascertaining what evidence really exists--or existed in the times of ancient authors, whose works have come down to us--of the knowledge of India by Europeans in days gone by, I instituted an inquiry, with the determination to be impartial. The results obtained were the following:--