We now turn to Gibbon's history, and inquire into the period when monastic asceticism first began to prevail in Egypt, the necessary residence of our presumed Hindoo traffickers. We find (see _Decline and Fall_, chapter 37) that Anthony, an Egyptian, and unable to write in Greek, living in the lower parts of Thebais, distributed his patrimony, deserted his family and native home, lived amongst tombs, or in a ruined tower, then in the desert, and then in some lonely spot, near the Red Sea, where he found shade and water. It certainly seems clear that he took the son of Maya, rather than the child of Mary, as his exemplar. At and after this time, the rage for asceticism spread amongst the inhabitants of Eastern Africa as conspicuously as it had done in Oriental Asia at the time of Asoka. It is difficult to read the chapter of Gibbon's history to which we refer, and a history of Buddhism, without regarding Egypt, and her miserable ascetics, in the same light as we look upon the folks of Hindustan and Thibet. If Jesus of Nazareth had dictated such a life, surely his early followers would have been more conspicuous in their habitual mortifications than their later disciples were. The son of man--the child of Mary--"came eating and drinking," and was called "a gluttonous man and a wine bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners" (Luke vii. 34; Matt, xi. 19). Not so the son of Maya. The Apostles of Jesus had power to lead about a wife or a sister, and they did so. Neither Paul nor Peter shunned woman's society, nor did they practise poverty; nay, they worked with their own hands, lest they should have to live on alms (2 Thess. iii. 8), and they collected money for poor saints from the wealthier brethren. There was no asceticism here, nor can we find, in any part of the New Testament, a text upon which a system of austerity can be founded. We might, perhaps, think comparatively little of the parallel which we have drawn between Buddhism, and Christianity, did we not recognize the fact, that almost everyone of the later developments of the latter had, for centuries before, found a place in the former, even including, as we have mentioned, the dogma of the immaculate conception.