than that of the most idolatrous of peoples, a worship founded on the efficacy of magical incantations, and of prayers rendered by machines. Just for this very reason its II.—Internal History is very instructive, and we shall now proceed to consider a few of its most salient points. Buddhism, in a quiet land and tranquil age, was launched upon the world as a new theory of life—a system so rounded off and completed that its disciples had no other duty than that of believing, obeying, and propagating it. Christianity, on the other hand, began its career amid the convulsions of political revolution, and for three centuries of conflict it had to fight every inch of its way. It was not, however, as a new system that it appeared in history, but as a new principle of life, round which all the moral, and spiritual, and intellectual energies which it found in mankind, and all which itself might awaken, might form and gather strength. It was impossible, therefore, that it ever could remain stationary. Its apostles were commissioned to carry on all that their Lord had “begun both to do and to teach.” He distinctly promised them increase of knowledge and power from on high, and all the changes which increase or growth implies. To-day His religion could no more be made to return to the form in which it was manifested eighteen centuries ago than man could be made to put on the clothes of his childhood. Its development, however, is that of its inherent life, manifesting all the continuity and identity of the sapling with the tree, of the boy with the man. Like all growing things, it has been subject to disease by contagion and infection, but it has always preserved life in sufficient volume to slough off its impurities and to pass onward through reformation to health. Now, the history of Buddhism, on the contrary, reveals only a long process of degradation, without having manifested any power as yet to recover and to reform itself according to its original and essential principles.[347]