In this respect, therefore, there is a significant difference between the two religions. Christianity, with all the world against it, and in spite of three centuries of unparalleled persecutions, succeeded in vanquishing the highest, while yet approving itself as a gospel to the lowest civilisation. Buddhism, with the greatest powers of the Eastern world in its favour, and never, perhaps, save in China, called to bear the shock of a single persecution, has only succeeded in being accepted by inferior branches of the human race. The Hindu Aryans, assimilating what of it they approved, rejected what of it was peculiar and distinctive. The Semitic followers of Islam simply crushed it under foot, and it never rose high enough even to touch the Western Aryans.[344] Very early it withdrew itself entirely within the circles of the Turanian peoples; and if to-day in Mongolia, Manchuria, among the Kalmucs on the Wolga, and the Bunjads on the shores of the Baikal Sea, it may be said to be advancing, the most competent authorities assure us that everywhere else its progress is arrested, and that, even where it is most upheld by local governments, in the regions of its most dominant supremacy, it yields manifest signs of decay.[345] Another and even more significant contrast is found in the fact that the advance of Christianity has ever been farthest and most rapid when its faith was purely taught and most consistently illustrated. It never sought peace with other religions without being defeated, and never allied itself with superstition without bringing shame and disaster on all concerned. It has had its periods of deterioration and defection, but somehow it has always survived them. Indeed, its vitality is as truly indicated by the corruptions which it has outlived, as by the external opposition which it has vanquished. Its real conquests are due to the expansive power of its inherent and original principles. The very opposite is the case with Buddhism. Its fundamental principles being unnatural and repugnant to the essential instincts of mankind, it was from the very first a morbid growth, having in it the seeds of decay. It never could have lived in the strength of its own principles, and so the story of its advance is one of perpetual compromise with every popular superstition that it met. The more it assimilated itself to them, the more it seemed to grow; but as foreign influences took possession of it, its own life oozed out of it, till very early it represented a system so perverted that its founder would have repudiated and abhorred it. The Church has often travestied Christianity, but it never fell from the faith so fearfully as Buddhism has everywhere fallen from the original doctrine of Buddha. Religion, worship, even the purest, he intended by his system to supersede, and now his name is employed to support the grossest of all superstitions,[346] a religion with more idols in it