It is not necessary to trace the sickening degradation of Christianity through all its encounters and compromises with heathenism, till in the gathering gloom its degenerate art reached a point where it dared to portray to the eye of sense the death-pangs of the Son of God, and its worship touched a depth of idolatry in which it symbolised the mystery of the Holy Trinity by a three-headed figure quite after the model of the Hindu Trimurti. It is sufficient to say that it appears to have proceeded on parallel lines, and at as rapid a pace as the degeneracy of Buddhism in the East. It too has its iconography as well as its literature, and it is interesting to trace its passage from its earliest graffiti—the stone edicts of Asoka, where we have the religion without even the name of the founder—through the carvings of the Sanchi gateway, where there is alteration, though to no considerable extent, on to those at Amravati, where we have the full-blown Buddhism to which China to a considerable extent succumbed.[386] Through all this period everywhere in Chinese Buddhist temples were seen the idols of the saints, everywhere were found their worshipped relics. A bone, a tooth, a single hair, would be purchased by the revenue of a State and welcomed with imperial honours. The rationalists of the West might protest as loudly and as scoffingly as they pleased that there was as much wood of the true cross and as many veritable nails of it in Europe as would suffice to build a navy. The Confucian mandarins at the court of a relic-worshipping Emperor might indignantly denounce the desecration and pollution of the royal palace by the introduction of part of the carrion of a monk who had died long ago.[387] With the father of Gideon, deriding the wonder-working powers of these relics, they might insist that they, and even Buddha himself, should plead, Baal-like, for themselves against their iconoclastic ire; but at that time neither law, nor persecution, nor common sense could prevail to cure this perverted disposition. Belief in the virtue of a fetich marks both the infancy and decay of most religions. In Chinese Buddhism to-day this belief is as vigorous as ever, and notwithstanding the influence of the Reformation, and the spread of scientific discovery, this belief marks an extreme of thought from which neither Romanism nor Protestantism as yet can be said to be free.