There is yet another characteristic of this religion which has commended it more to the unbelief than the belief of our age. Many agreements are alleged to subsist between the contents of the New Testament and those of the sacred books which profess to record the life and express the teaching of Buddha. Its ancient Pitakas are said to be filled with stories resembling the narratives of the Evangelists, with sayings which recall the parables, and miracles reflecting the signs and wonders which signalised the ministry of Jesus. It is averred that with the single exception of the Crucifixion—and how immense is the significance of that exception I shall endeavour in a subsequent lecture to show,—it would be easy to find in them a parallel to almost every incident related in the Gospel. Most startling of all are said to be the resemblances between the central figures in both sets of scriptures. For Buddhism, as truly as Christianity, has its ideal of a perfect human life, illustrated in one who, like unto the Son of Man, went about doing good, and enforcing by his example the pure morality which he preached, but who, most unlike the Son of Man, without any sustaining belief in deity, or hope of sympathy or help from any divine being, professed to have made good his own salvation, and to teach all whom he could reach the way to work out theirs. When we come to examine its history, we find that it has followed a line of development strikingly parallel to that of Christianity, and the parallels thus furnished by its antecedents and progress, and by the external and foreign influences which encountered and modified it, are those which have the most interest and instruction for the student of Religion. In order, however, to ascertain their significance, we must examine these alleged correspondences of story and of doctrine; for these have powerfully influenced a certain class of thinkers, as supplying confirmation of a charge brought against our religion in almost the beginning of its history, that after all there was nothing original in Christ, and nothing new in His teaching. That resemblances do exist, not only between the forms in which Buddhism confronts us in some quarters of the world and the ritual and organisation of a large section of the Christian Church, but between the contents of the Buddhist scriptures as we have them now, and those of the New Testament, all must admit. As we cast a hasty and general glance over them we see how natural and how pardonable was the old rough and ready method of accounting for them by the supposition of direct transference of the various lineaments from the one to the other. The early Jesuit missionaries did not hesitate to assert that the Buddhists, by assimilating and incorporating the rites and doctrines of the primitive missionaries, had succeeded in producing a caricature of Christianity. In like manner, when in Central America—till then as independent of