The Gospels are not the earliest Christian writings, and not several, but many, “narratives concerning those matters which had been fulfilled or established among” Christians, even as they “delivered them who were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,”[162] were probably in circulation before the Gospels were written. Some of the Epistles of St. Paul also, in all probability, preceded those collections of “the words and deeds of the Lord”; but the substance of the three first Gospels was very early produced, and we may be morally certain that they contain the beliefs which the very first generation of Christians entertained concerning Him. The truth of these beliefs is not now under discussion, but only the fact of them, and the kind of people who were influenced by them. It is averred “that the outward conditions in which Buddhism and Christianity arose were similar, and so were the mental qualities of the disciples of both religions”;[163] but the conditions were most dissimilar in this respect, that Buddhism originated in the dimness of an unhistoric age, and Christianity in an age and land so irradiated by the light of history that we know more clearly what was happening then and there than we do of what occurred in Europe a thousand years after. The mental qualities of the disciples of both religions again seem to have been most unlike. About Ananda and his companions we know really nothing but the names, for they meet us in the Buddhist records as mere lay figures, completely resembling one another, and with no individuality to distinguish them.[164] We may assume, however, that they belonged to one or other of the many sects of Brahmans or Sramans, and if so, that they were dreamy and contemplative men, withdrawn from practical life, and finding in the life of meditation a sphere more congenial to them than the actual world of which they were parts. They appear to have been directly and thoroughly unlike to the very marked personalities represented by the Evangelists and the other apostles of Christ, who were all drawn from practical life to be His followers. They were the very reverse of speculative; they had little imagination and almost no poetry in them; they were very dull of comprehension in regard to truths higher than the few which they inherited, and very incredulous about any unwonted occurrence said to have taken place outside the little circle of their own observation. In their conscientious, matter-of-fact way of looking at things they were the very last men to dream dreams or weave legends around the memory of one whom they revered; and we have their own confession, not of their slowness of apprehension merely, but of their unbelief at first in regard to all supernatural manifestations.