When we turn from Palestine to the holy land of Magadha, the cradle of Buddhism in the sixth century B.C., we find no light of history streaming upon it. All is dim and shadowy, with no chronology to define events, and no incidents to distinguish personalities. It is like a land of dreams to our modern conception, but it is not a chaos. We can trace to a certain extent movements in it, and as we follow them there emerges in outline sufficiently clear a real civilisation, which, though lacking the stir and endeavour, the commerce and the art of the West, and really inferior to it, is yet most interesting in its pathetic resemblances, and all the more instructive that its beliefs and institutions were formed out of antecedents and predispositions very different from any of which the Western world had experience. It is evident from the very cursory survey already made that religious belief in India and in the West must have passed through phases significantly similar. In both it proceeded from faith in a revealed system of truth—in India in the inspired Vedas, in Palestine in the inspired oracles. Human speculation in both cases was begotten, and for long it was educated in faith in revelation, then beginning to rationalise; in both cases it unintentionally undermined what at first it only endeavoured to explain. Turning from ancient scrolls to the study of the book of human nature, whose pages, though often tattered and defiled, are always fascinating, it was staggered by the contradiction between man’s ideals of goodness and justice and the realities of human history. Out of this collision arose the Promethean demand that the divine powers that govern life “should either explain or abdicate.” In Palestine this wrestle with the inequalities of providence originated early, and continued all along; but it was confined within limits by faith in the personality of Deity as one so infinitely greater than man that only a part of His ways could be understood. Indian speculation never reached the approaches to this idea of God: it wandered into a Pantheism of a grosser type than ever the West was acquainted with, and once it reached that stage it could not stop. Just as in Greece pantheism ripened into the materialism of the Epicurean and the atheism of the Stoic, so in India, even before the days of Gotama, may have begun that open revolt against Deity, in the perilous attempt of reason to explain by itself the universe, with which his name has since then been most closely associated.