no man can show that the legend of Buddha, in a form containing any coincidence which could be held to argue a borrowing from it by Christians, was in existence before the Christian era”; “that all the various versions of the legend in any language date from a time later than the Christian era”; “that the chief Sanskrit authority for it cannot be proved in the judgment of the most competent critics to have existed in its present form nearly as far back as the Christian era”; and though he does not allege any actual transference from the Gospel to the Buddha legend, he avers with justifiable confidence that the opportunity for “such a transference before the Sanskrit version assumed its present form is an indubitable fact.”[44] These suggestions, though just as worthy of consideration and support as the theory that Christianity is either an offshoot of Vedic Brahminism or a direct product of Buddhist speculation, need not be discussed at present. We may content ourselves with the conclusions formed by our most reliable authorities, that Buddhism and Christianity in their origin and earliest development were perfectly independent of each other. The births of their founders were separated by centuries, and the spheres of their ministry by almost the whole extent of Asia. While thus sundered by the conditions of both time and space, they were still more so by their intellectual peculiarities and antecedents. The Indian differed very widely from the Jew in his way of looking at and reasoning about things. He would be very differently impressed by the same or similar phenomena, and he would communicate his impressions by a very different method. Geographically India was shut up from the rest of the world, and the Aryans who went down into it were left in a manner hardly paralleled by other peoples to develop their own life out of itself, and according to its own laws. In far less favourable circumstances, and far removed from the educational stimulus of contact with alien or cognate nations, they came to stand alone as a people scarcely intelligible by others. The Jews, on the other hand, were early brought into the stream of human movement. Mingled with many peoples, sent from land to land, they became in spite of their passionate love for their own country the cosmopolitans of the world. Consequently when the two races came in contact, the circles of thought and feeling in which they moved could hardly be said to touch. Solomon’s sailors, as regards religious or philosophical treasures, could neither give nor take away. They had almost nothing in common with the strange people whom they met. The Sanskrit words which they took home to designate the peculiar products obtained in Ophir indicated how helpless they would have been to understand the metaphysics of India even had they inquired about them. The natives of Western India a thousand years before Christ were as helpless to understand the Jew. You have only to compare a prophecy of