The story of Buddhism in India, where without much resistance it yielded to the seductions of Vishnaism and Sivaism, the record of its conquests in the surrounding countries, and especially in those just referred to, present few and slight analogies to the history of Christianity; but the story of Buddhism in China as related by those most competent to testify of the changing forms which it assumed from the fourth century onwards, is significantly akin to that of Christianity after it became the religion of the Empire. China, unlike India, had before the Christian era a very ancient history, marked by distinct epochs. Its annals, even of the eighth century B.C., seem to reflect a civilisation similar to that of Europe in the thirteenth century A.D. Two thousand years B.C. the Chinese are said to have attained to an idea of Deity somewhat equivalent to the El Elion of Melchizedek.[372] Shangti, the highest of all spirits to whom the people sacrificed, was the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of the world, unapproachable by the sinner, but merciful to all penitents; and in this idea of God, and in the morality which sprang from it, we have the secret of that social and political progress whose arrestment and decay Confucius lamented. Living in a degenerate age, he laboured earnestly as a reformer of personal morality and social order; but, departing himself from the ancestral faith in a Supreme Ruler of nature and man, “respecting, but keeping aloof, as he said, from all spiritual beings,” expressively silent as to the future, and refusing to present motives of conduct drawn from consideration of it, his vigorous ministry, conducted for many years in many of the States, could only have the effect of preparing the way for a real regeneration of society. He had great faith in man, as born good, with an innate moral faculty which only contact with the world and the delusion of the senses prevent from making him virtuous. Man was made for society, and the five relations of which society consists—that of ruler and subject, husband and wife, parent and child, elder brother and younger, and friend and friend—were Divine ordinances. His standard of personal righteousness and social purity, his strong faith in the power of example, his golden rule, “_What you would not like to have done to yourself, do not to any other_,”[373] his demand, as urgent as was that of Isaiah or Socrates,[374] that language should be used ever with scrupulous care to express only the thing that is, have gone far to form, with beneficial ethical results, the ordinary Chinese character. His ignoring of personal Deity, only referred to under the vague term Heaven, and of the future of man, could not long arrest the degeneracy of society or purge out the secret vices burrowing beneath its surface. If Buddha is to be regarded in his bold metaphysical speculations as the first of Gnostics, Confucius in his pure secularism may be designated the first Agnostic,