But Christianity from the very earliest possessed what Buddhism for a long period lacked. In its canonical writings it conserved not only a check upon this apostasy, but a security for reformation. Mechanical though it seems, there was a providence in the early committal to writing of such books as compose our Bibles. In the fact that their successive disclosures of truth were thus registered there is more significance than at first appears. It is admitted by all that man’s progress depends in no small degree on his ability to secure and hand down the treasures of his wisdom and experience. The art of writing is thus recognised to be one of the most moving powers in the world. The nations that have depended upon it for the transmission of knowledge inherited or acquired, have certainly made more progress in religion and civilisation than those that have neglected or despised it. It is significant that the writers of the Bible have all recognised this condition of human progress, and that many of them have represented themselves as instructed by the Divine authority, from whom they profess to have received their communications, to make them permanent in popular language and in plain written form.[79] In the history of the Hebrews there is not a single recorded instance of religious reformation in which the law and the testimony, or the scrolls of the prophets, did not play an important part. In like manner the New Testament, which embodies the ideals and perpetuates the standard which is to regulate its course, not only saved Christianity from the perils which threatened its earliest spread, but has often rescued it from the degradation into which it has fallen. Canonical books may only give, as it has been said, “the reflected image of the real doctrines of the founder of a religion, an image always blurred and distorted by the medium through which it has to pass”;[80] but in the case of the New Testament the Church has never developed, or thought it possible to develop, a purer reflection. Advance as it may, the Church never can outgrow the ideals of its youth, and change what it pleases, it never can improve them. Whenever the Church assumed supremacy over its law, and whenever tradition superseded its testimony, it yielded to the disintegrating influences of heathenism. It was rapidly lapsing into polytheism when Mohammed rose with a spurious and mutilated version of the Scriptures to recall it to the witness of true Scriptures to the unity and sovereignty of God. Later on, when sinking through formalism into superstition and sorcery almost as degrading as any Indian, Luther, by the re-discovery of the Greek Testament, brought about a reformation which not only saved Europe, but has created a new Western and Southern world. In every revival and every advance which has taken place since then there may be traced, directly or indirectly, the regenerative influences of the Christian originals. On its human side the Christian