Though as yet the field is only opening out, and its exploration is only beginning, there can be little doubt that it will be found that in their advanced stages Buddhism and Greek and Latin Christianity have contributed to each other’s resources; but it is quite another matter to assert that the existence of the one religion accounts for the origin of the other, and that Christianity, as the junior of the two, is simply “a product of India spoiled in its route to Palestine.”[25] Those who allege that the sources of Christianity may be discovered in Buddhism are bound not to assume but clearly to trace and demonstrate the medium of communication between the two. As yet the allegation, though frequently made, appears to be incapable of proof. Renan’s picture of “wandering Buddhist monks who overran the whole world, and converted on the banks of the Jordan, by their garb and manners, people who did not understand their language, like the Franciscan monks in later days,” is only a pious imagination.[26] And so are the theories elaborated by M. Emile Burnouf in the _Science of Religions_ and by M. Ernest de Bunsen in his _Angel Messiah of the Buddhists_. Both these authors have explained to their own satisfaction the derivation of Christianity from old Indian or Aryan beliefs, which, transmitted through Parthia to the Babylonian Jews, by them communicated to the Essenes John Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, and from them again passed on to the Therapeut Stephen, were formulated in the plastic mind of Paul of Tarsus into the Christian dogmas which we now revere. The scheme is devised with thoroughly French precision, and the treatises in which it is elaborated, full as they are of indications of great ingenuity and laborious research, are interesting as any romance. For scientific purposes, however, they have hardly more historic worth than a romance. Based upon assumptions, they are constructed almost entirely of hypotheses: when a difficulty emerges, it is solved by a supposition which further on is confirmed by a “reasonable expectation” of something else, so that by and by the supposition meets us as an established result. They abound in analogies, some of which transgress as flagrantly the laws of time as the theory once advanced that the story of Christ is only a reflection of the legend of Krishna, seeing that belief in Krishna did not arise in India till centuries after Christianity had reached its shores. “The laws of language[27] are also violated as openly as they were by the discovery that the mysterious word ‘Om’ of the Upanishads is the equivalent of the ‘Amen’ in ancient Hebrew worship.” It may be as possible by this method to prove the connection between the Vedic and Levitical institutions, as it is possible to establish the conclusion that the old Aryan symbol of the fire sticks is the fontal idea of the Cross, or that the Vedic word “Agni” is equivalent to the Latin “Agnus Dei.” Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter[28] and