Was Marcion so far wrong? Was it blasphemy, or was it intuition, divine inspiration in him to express that which every honest heart yearning for truth, more or less feels and acknowledges? If in his sincere desire to establish a purely spiritual religion, a universal faith based on unadulterated truth, he found it necessary to make of Christianity an entirely new and separate system from that of Judaism, did not Marcion have the very words of Christ for his authority? “No man putteth a piece of new cloth into an old garment ... for the rent is made worse.... Neither do men put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish; but _they put new wine into new bottles_, and both are preserved.” In what particular does the jealous, wrathful, revengeful God of Israel resemble the unknown deity, the God of mercy preached by Jesus;--_his_ Father who is in Heaven, and the Father of all humanity? This Father alone is the God of spirit and purity, and, to compare Him with the subordinate and capricious Sinaitic Deity is an error. Did Jesus ever pronounce the name of Jehovah? Did he ever place _his_ Father in contrast with this severe and cruel Judge; his God of mercy, love, and justice, with the Jewish genius of retaliation? Never! From that memorable day when he preached his Sermon on the Mount, an immeasurable void opened between his God and that other deity who fulminated his commands from that other mount--Sinai. The language of Jesus is unequivocal; it implies not only rebellion but defiance of the Mosaic “Lord God.” “Ye have heard,” he tells us, “that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but _I say_ unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. Ye have heard that it hath been said [by the same “Lord God” on Sinai]: Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But _I say_ unto you; Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (_Matthew_ v.). And now, open _Manu_ and read: “Resignation, _the action of rendering good for evil_, temperance, probity, purity, repression of the senses, the knowledge of the _Sastras_ (the holy books), that of the supreme soul, truthfulness and abstinence from anger, such are the ten virtues in which consists duty.... Those who study these ten precepts of duty, and after having studied them conform their lives thereto, will reach to the supreme condition” (_Manu_, book vi., sloka 92). If _Manu_ did not trace these words many thousands of years before the era of Christianity, at least no voice in the whole world will dare deny them a less antiquity than several centuries B.C. The same in the case of the precepts of Buddhism. If we turn to the _Prâtimoksha Sûtra_ and other religious tracts of the Buddhists, we read the ten following commandments: