If the origin of this deity can be attributed to the personification of a spirit of purity, the origin of the next, Kwannin, is probably from some source outside Buddhism. She is the goddess of mercy, but whatever her origin, she at present represents the remnants of either the Nestorian or the mediæval Roman teaching. In Peking they have a curious image of her which any one might mistake for a Madonna, the truth being that there was at one time an intimate contact between Christianity and Buddhism, when many of the externals of the Christian religion and some of its doctrines were transplanted. The Buddhist temple with its altar in the centre looks strangely like a Christian church, and the Buddhist monks and nuns, with their rosaries and their regular hours for chanting and service, recall the Roman Catholic services; the picture of the Buddhist hell which stands in the great Mongol temple at Peking reminds one of a scene from Dante's Inferno, and among the many things the Buddhists borrow from Christian sources {151} are these two ideas, embodied in two idols, the goddess of mercy who intercedes for mankind, and the god of faith in whom the worshipper should put all trust and confidence. Besides these gods there are the god of war and the god of good-fellowship, probably taken from old heathen sources. Again, there are hundreds of Buddhas, or as we should call them, "saints," whose position is somewhere between human and divine, much the same position that the saints occupy in the mind of a Neapolitan peasant.