Israel of the eighth century B.C. with the earliest of the Upanishads to find how widely separated at that date was the Semite from the Aryan of India. Even when their own kinsmen visited them, when the descendants of sires who had occupied the same cradle and had heard the same stories told over them in the one primeval home, met for deadly strife in the wars of Alexander on the plains of the Punjab, they were aliens in almost everything. Later on, when Christian missionaries, anxious to teach them better ways, succeeded in influencing their religious conceptions, the Hindus always modified what of our faith they adopted. The question how far the early proclamation of the Gospel in India influenced the development of Hinduism is by the best of judges considered not yet settled,[45] but even those who affirm the reality of this influence admit that Hinduism did not so much incorporate the doctrines as assimilate the ideas of Christianity. The ultimate decision of this question, however, does not in any way affect the one before us. We may be almost certain that the great mass of Indian speculation on man and his relations to the infinite, for many centuries before our era, was developed originally from the resources of the Indian mind quite apart from foreign influences. The same assertion will hold good as to the rise of Greek philosophy and of the Christian religion. Not one of the three can be understood without careful reference to their particular antecedents, but they can never be accounted for by any theory of derivation of the one from the other.