The first impulse to look in the ancient religion of India for reminiscences of revealed truth seems to have come from missionaries rather than from scholars. It arose from a motive, in itself most excellent, of finding some common ground for those who wished to convert and those who were to be converted. Only, instead of looking for that common ground where it really was to be found—namely, in the broad foundations on which all religions are built up: the belief in a divine power, the acknowledgment of sin, the habit of prayer, the desire to offer sacrifice, and the hope of a future life—the students of Pagan religion as well as Christian missionaries were bent on discovering more striking and more startling coincidences, in order to use them in confirmation of their favorite theory that some rays of a primeval revelation, or some reflection of the Jewish religion, had reached the uttermost ends of the world. This was a dangerous proceeding—dangerous because superficial, dangerous because undertaken with a foregone conclusion; and very soon the same arguments that had been used on one side in order to prove that all religious truth had been derived from the Old Testament were turned against Christian scholars and Christian missionaries, in order to show that it was not Brahmanism and Buddhism which had borrowed from the Old and New Testament, but that the Old and the New Testament had borrowed from the more ancient religions of the Brahmans and Buddhists. This argument was carried out, for instance, in Holwell’s “Original Principles of the Ancient Brahmans,” published in London as early as 1779, in which the author maintains that “the Brahmanic religion is the first and purest product of supernatural revelation,” and “that the Hindu scriptures contain to a moral certainty the original doctrines and terms of restoration delivered from God himself, by the mouth of his first created Birmah, to mankind, at his first creation in the form of man.” Sir William Jones(48) tells us that one or two missionaries in India had been absurd enough, in their zeal for the conversion of the Gentiles, to urge “that the Hindus were even now almost Christians, because their Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesa were no other than the Christian Trinity;” a sentence in which, he adds, we can only doubt whether folly, ignorance, or impiety predominates.