Mr. Higgins goes on to show "the idle pretensions that the Brahmins, some way or other, have got copies of the apocryphal gospels, from which they have taken the history of the birth, life, and adventures of Chrishna. How wonderfully absurd," says he, "to suppose that all the ancient emblems and idols of Christna, in the temples and caves scattered over every part of India, _and absolutely identified with them in point of antiquity,_ can have been copied from the gospels written after the time of Jesus! How wonderfully absurd, that the Brahmins, and people of this widely extended empire, should condescend to copy from the real or cast-away spurious gospels of a sect, at that time almost unknown in their own country; and many thousand miles distant from these Brahmins!" The deified Hercules, the personified power of the sun, was known in very remote antiquity; yet according to Arrian, he was fifteen centuries later than Bacchus, who was the same as the Hindu deity Siva. The triplicate godhead of India, says Arrian, consisted of Brahma, Chrishna, and Seeva, _three in one, and one in three_ viz., the Creator, Preserver, or Savior, and the Destroyer.* Now, Arrian wrote in the second century, in the time of the Emperor Adrian, when the New Testament of the Christians was not yet got up; and as for their Trinity, they did not fully imitate the Hindu in that triune point, until about the close of the fourth century. * According to a passage of Arrian, quoted in the Edinburgh Review, Chrishna was worshipped in the time of Alexander, at what still remains one of the most famous temples of India, that of Mathura, on the Jumna, the Matura Deorum of Ptolemy. All the garbled statements, and mean subterfuges that could be invented by powerful priesthoods, in league with corrupt Rulers, have been brought into play to oppose and stifle the above incontrovertible facts. This unblushing effrontery is quite "in trade" with parties whose interest it undoubtedly is that these things should be known only amongst themselves, lest the "simple-minded" should be induced to suspect that they had been most egregiously duped by men whose very living depends upon deception. The wonderful resemblance,--the apparent sameness or identity--of the Indian and Christian mythics, must have shaken the well-settled faith of Sir William Jones; and so far, his love of truth got the better of his piety; otherwise, he would no doubt have been willing to suppress the alarming truth of the vastly higher antiquity of the Hindu allegory.* Why did he conceal the crucifixion part of the fable, _and the fact of its being represented as taking place in the sky?_ It was in vain he expected that other writers on India, many of whom were equally well-informed, would be as disingenuous as himself.