In Christianity, as in nature, the grafting of the good stock upon the wild conquered the wild. Christ took nothing from Judaism but the universalism of its prophets, its faith in one living and true God, the Heavenly Father of multitudes whom Abraham was ignorant of, and Israel did not acknowledge. His apostles, judged by the literature which they have bequeathed, seem faithfully to have carried out His principles; but many of their converts were strict Jews, who insisted upon some visible connection with the old religion. Just as Dêvadatta, their prototype, held that a true Buddhist must first be a good Brahman in respect of asceticism, so they insisted that Christians were debtors to keep what of the old law was expressed in circumcision, and the observance of certain other commandments and ordinances. The danger of Christianity being reduced to the bondage of the old was serious, but the inspiration of St. Paul, the providential destruction of the nation, and the marvellous spread of the religion among the Gentiles, eventually overcame it. The spirit of Judaism, it is true, has never been wholly cast out from the Christian Church. All through its history it is traceable in one form or another of the ritualism and asceticism which, like Brahmanism, it may be held to represent. There have been times when it has attained to portentous and pernicious influence, and such times may happen again; but from the early days there has always been in Christianity vitality sufficient to detect and try and condemn it; and so though Judaism, and even Paganism, to some extent, still taint the theology and worship of the Church, we need have no fear that the genius of the old religion will ever gain, as it did in the case of Buddhism, permanent ascendency over the new.