The offspring of Brahmanism, from which it differed more in degree than in substance, at no period of its history did it succeed in completely disentangling itself from it. Not only did the forms of the old religion cling to it; its very life was continued in the new. While Buddha rejected all the sacrificial rites and religious observances of Brahmanism, and preached a law subversive of all its faith in revelation, he accepted and continued its ascetism and its hope of deliverance by a process of meditation and of abstraction. It was by himself, therefore, and not by his cousin Dêvadatta,[348] that the heretic leaven was introduced into the lump. Dêvadatta’s attempted changes were not innovations, but a return to the primitive rule, a logical deduction from a law which Gotama never wholly rejected. Just as to the patriarchs of the Greek, the Western or Romish Church “is the chief heresy of latter days,” just as the Pope was branded in their Encyclical of 1848 “as the first founder of German Rationalism,”[349] so the successive advances and orthodox decisions of the Buddhist Councils were denounced as apostasies by men like Dêvadatta. Still these changes were due in great measure to the beliefs which Buddhism had inherited, for when in the inevitable rebound from its unnatural Nihilism the theistic movement set in, the spirit of Brahmanism, which had passed into it at the first, began to assert itself, and, interpenetrating it more and more, prepared it for that issue in which, blending with the popular forms in which Brahmanism was then expressing itself, Buddhism merged into the composite system of Hinduism which confronts us in India to-day.