If this be not impure Christianity, no one will dare to call it pure Buddhism. Surely it is a hopeful indication for the future of Japan, as being evidently a movement somewhat similar to that inaugurated in India by Rammohun Roy, and greatly furthered in our days by Chunder Sen. The first professed to trace his reform to the Upanishads rediscovered, and expounded, and applied; and the second to the Vedas as the primitive fountains of the faith. Both reformers and their work would have been impossible two thousand years ago; yea, they would have been equally impossible to-day, had not the West given of its thoughts to the East, and Christendom communicated to it something of its better life. It is one thing to read the Vedas and Upanishads, as the Rishis recited or the Brahmans expounded them long ago, and quite another to have them interpreted by natives of India, around whose forefathers for several generations all the influences of Christian civilisation have been playing. So is it with the reforming Buddhists of China and Japan, who have enterprise to send their sons to study at our British Universities. They are reading their old literature—even when rejecting our systems of belief—with minds unconsciously saturated with Christian intelligence, and no doubt they often find there what the Gospel has put in themselves. We may rest assured that the reform of the Oriental religions will only be effected by the infusion into them of the spirit of Christianity. A higher religion meeting them as Christianity does, may not supplant or destroy them, but it will revive and transform them. It will destroy much that is false, correct much that is wrong, supply all they lack, and so in the end annul them. The product will not likely be a facsimile of any of the Churches of Christendom. It may be a religion in which Buddha and the great teachers of his system will be lifted to their places among the prophets who, “since the world began,” unconsciously testified, by their errors as well as by their truths, by their failures as well as by their successes, to the Mystery to be revealed. The fact that in Buddhism the object of worship is not the Buddha that was, but Mâitrêya who is to be, is a pathetic confession that its Messiah has yet to come. Though Buddha did not proclaim His coming, the result of his mission bears witness to the need of Him. So he was a lawgiver preparing the way for Moses, even as Moses prepared the way for the Baptist, and as the Baptist heralded the Christ of God. Could his voice reach down to-day from “the quiet shore” to the millions who have taken hold of him in hope of finding deliverance from the miseries and perplexities of this sinful world, it would be to repeat a testimony once heard on Jordan’s banks from him than whom no one born of woman was greater: “There standeth One among you whom ye know not, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.” Footnote 319: Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, ii. 33. 35.