Maya dreams that she is carried by archangels to heaven, and that there the future Buddha enters her right side in the form of a superb white elephant. Rhys Davids relates this legend on p. 183 of his Buddhism, and in a footnote he says: "Csoma Korösi refers in a distant way to a belief of the later Mongol Buddhists that Maya was a virgin (As. Res. xx. 299); but this has not been confirmed. St. Jerome says (Adversus Jovin., bk. 1): 'It is handed down as a tradition among the Gymnosophists of India that Buddha, the founder of their system, was brought forth by a virgin from her side.'" In Samuel Beal's Romantic History of Buddha (from the Chinese version) we read of Buddha's miraculous birth, and that there is ground to assume the prevalence of this belief for centuries before Christ. Bunsen, again (p. x. of his Angel-Messiah), speaks of the "Virgin Maya, on whom, according to Chinese tradition, the Holy Ghost had descended"; and elsewhere (e.g., pp. 10 and 25) he adopts this version of the legend. Dr. Knowling, in his apologetic work, Our Lord's Virgin Birth and the Criticism of Today, pp. 53-4, lays stress upon the grotesqueness of the idea that a man should enter his mother's womb in the form of a white elephant. But, as Dr. Rhys Davids explains (p. 184 of Buddhism), there is nothing bizarre when the origin of the poetical figure has been ascertained. The belief was borrowed from the older sun-worship, "the white elephant, like the white horse [cf. Rev. vi. 2 and xix. 11, 14], being an emblem of the sun, the universal monarch of the sky." P. 126, lines 1-2.--He was very early regarded as omniscient and absolutely sinless. Dr. Rhys Davids's remarks on the early growth of myths concerning Buddha, coming as they do from a champion of the Christian cause, are full of significance for anyone who permits himself to think and who keeps an open mind. He says (p. 182 of Buddhism): "The belief soon sprang up that he could not have been, that he was not, born as ordinary men are; that he had no earthly father; that he descended of his own accord into his mother's womb from his throne in heaven; and that he gave unmistakeable signs, immediately after his birth, of his high character and of his future greatness." We have a perfect illustration of the possibility and rapidity of the legend-making process in the nineteenth century. The Bab (or "gateway") was a Persian reformer who suffered martyrdom at the hands of the authorities in 1850. Within forty years an evidently mythical version of his life was current among his followers in the form of a Gospel. Babism inculcates a high morality, and there is a likelihood of its becoming paramount in Persia. For further information on this new religion see Life and Teachings of Abbas Effendi, by Myron H. Phelps (Putnam). P. 127, line 10.--Born of the Virgin Isis.