The wealthy are more likely to lend to than to borrow from the poor; the wise more likely to teach, though they do sometimes learn from the less instructed. The strong may be infected by the diseases of the feeble, but generally the contagion of health radiates from the more robust to the weaker vitalities. The “power” which the touch of the East has “made to go forth from us”[42] no doubt flows back in quickened life upon ourselves. As these Oriental studies proceed, the tables will perhaps be turned upon the school that would derive all our philosophy and religion from old Indian sources. We have seen that two successive waves of Western life flowed eastwards upon the shores of India. Another rich stream of Semitic thought in pre-Buddhistic times, represented by such religious teachers as the second Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, reached the Tigris, and we may ask, Was the Indus unknown to them? We do not assert that they knew it, but surely it was just as easy for a Jew to reach India as for Burnouf or de Bunsen’s Buddhists to reach Babylon. It was just as probable that a Jewish pedlar found his way eastward through Parthia to India, with other and more precious goods in his possession than the Babylonian wares in his pack, as it was that Renan’s wandering Buddhist monk found his way to the Jordan. Later on there is a tradition—and though it is only a tradition, what a find to Messieurs Renan, Burnouf, and de Bunsen would one similar Buddhist tradition be!—that one of the original twelve apostles of Jesus evangelised a portion of the western shores of India. So, founding on all these data, only assuming—as we are entitled to assume—that the East was well connected with the West by the sea routes from Arabia and by the land route through Persia, and remembering that there is nothing so volatile and permeating as thought, is the speculation so very extravagant that old Indian philosophy and religion, though following their own course, may have been modified and purified by contact with the thoughts of the West? What if the conjecture be hazarded that from the West a thousand years B.C. was communicated the theistic impulse which produced what is best in the Upanishads—the truth, viz., of the unity which is behind and above all variety, the One Absolute into which all thought and all being is resolved?[43] What if it be some day asserted that the teaching of the Hebrew prophets before the Diaspora, as to the worthlessness of sacrifice to put away sin and to promote communion with God, may have insinuated itself into the reveries of Indian ascetics in their forest retreats, and made the teaching of reformers like Buddha possible? And what if to St. Thomas may be indirectly traced that influence which made later Buddhism differ so materially from the primitive, and approach in the similarities of its legends so close to the Gospel narratives? Dr. Kellogg already proclaims that “it may be affirmed with certainty that