Now Buddhism grew out of Brahmanism, but however divergent their relations eventually became, it was originally accepted as a natural consequence of it. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, there was for long no trace of serious antagonism between the Brahmans and many generations of the successors of Buddha. Brahmans formed a considerable portion of his followers, and in regard to his teaching, his doctrines, where not identical, were not likely to offend them. St. Paul scandalised the Pharisees by preaching that outward Jewish connection marked by the seal of circumcision profited nothing, but long before Buddha’s time Brahman teachers had declared, as he did, to that most exclusive of the Indian elect, that the true Brahman was not a person born within the sacred caste, but only the thoughtful and self-controlled man:[84] that a bad mind and wicked deeds are what defile a man, and that no outward observances can purify him.[85] Buddha has been designated as the best and wisest and greatest of Hindus; “a reformer of Hinduism who ignored its superstitions and follies, and sought to elevate and refine its dogmas.”[86] It is now considered very questionable whether the difference between the two systems ever grew into hostility involving persecution of the new religion by the old. The two streams of Hindu belief seem for long in their course in India to have flowed peaceably side by side, and if Buddhism eventually disappeared from India as a separate and distinct system, it was not altogether because it was crushed by persecution, but because it returned to enrich and modify the religion from which it originally parted.[87] Buddhism was thus an offspring of Brahmanism, but Brahmanism was itself the product of a religion older still. Behind Buddhism lies a great and undefined past, a past with no history in the proper sense of the word, and absolutely without chronology; but out of this vast and nebulous era there has been extracted a rich traditional literature, and Oriental scholars working on principles similar to those by which geologic periods are determined,[88] are endeavouring by an examination of the various civilisations reflected in that literature to establish the leading stages in the growth of prehistoric Indian thought. The sacred books of India disclose sufficiently in outline the social and religious progress of the people from a period of great antiquity. No one can tell when the oldest fragments of them were originally composed, but some of them are said to have been in circulation among the Aryans when one immigrant contingent of them had arrived at the confluence of Jumna with the Ganges,[89] and if so, they image for us the life and beliefs of a people who must have been contemporaries with Moses some fifteen centuries at latest before the coming of Christ.