Europe as if it had been separated not by untraversed oceans, but by the immensities that divide the planets—the Spaniards found to their amazement a most complex religion, with priests, and monasteries, and temples adorned with the cross and statues of a goddess with an infant in her arms, they could only explain the mystery by averring that it was a gigantic mimetic ruse of the devil to lead the unhappy nations astray. The suppositions in both cases are not likely to be seriously supported now. Indeed, it is far more likely, as the author of _Ancient Christianity_ and Dr. Prinsep and others have attempted to show, that in the East we have to seek for the origin of several institutions and rites once considered the peculiar growth of Greek or Latin Christianity. There can be little doubt that as these religions spread they would come in contact with and react upon each other.[23] It is difficult in the present state of our knowledge to indicate their first conjunction, or to trace their various intercommunications, but that they have been mutually indebted to each other is sufficiently attested by their histories. In later Hinduism and Buddhism and Lamaism there are plain indications of the action of the Western upon the Eastern religions. Romanism, on the other hand, has set its official seal upon the relationship, by incorporating a legend of Buddha among its “Lives of the Saints,” by canonising the founder of this most antichristian of all religions, and by consecrating the 27th November as a day on which he may be invoked for intercession.[24]