“Now _faith_ is the substance of things.... By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had _received the spies in peace_.”--_Hebrews_ xi. 1, 31. “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man hath faith, and have not works? _Can_ FAITH _save him_?... Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot _justified by works_, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way?”--_James_ ii. 14, 25. Clement describes Basilides, the Gnostic, as “a philosopher devoted to the contemplation of divine things.” This very appropriate expression may be applied to many of the founders of the more important sects which later were all engulfed in one--that stupendous compound of unintelligible dogmas enforced by Irenæus, Tertullian, and others, which is now termed Christianity. _If these must be called heresies, then early Christianity itself must be included in the number._ Basilides and Valentinus preceded Irenæus and Tertullian; and the two latter Fathers had less facts than the two former Gnostics to show that their _heresy_ was plausible. Neither divine right nor truth brought about the triumph of their Christianity; fate alone was propitious. We can assert, with entire plausibility, that there is not one of all these sects--Kabalism, Judaism, and our present Christianity included--but sprung from the two main branches of that one mother-trunk, the once universal religion, which antedated the Vedaic ages--we speak of that prehistoric Buddhism which merged later into Brahmanism. The religion which the primitive teaching of the early few apostles most resembled--a religion preached by Jesus himself--is the elder of these two, Buddhism. The latter as taught in its primitive purity, and carried to perfection by the last of the Buddhas, Gautama, based its moral ethics on three fundamental principles. It alleged that 1, every thing existing, exists from natural causes; 2, that virtue brings its own reward, and vice and sin their own punishment; and, 3, that the state of man in this world is probationary. We might add that on these three principles rested the universal foundation of every religious creed; God, and individual immortality for every man--if he could but win it. However puzzling the subsequent theological tenets; however seemingly incomprehensible the metaphysical abstractions which have convulsed the theology of every one of the great religions of mankind as soon as it was placed on a sure footing, the above is found to be the essence of every religious philosophy, with the exception of later Christianity. It was that of Zoroaster, of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Jesus, and even of Moses, albeit the teachings of the Jewish law-giver have been so piously tampered with.