On page 10 of Rhys Davids' well-known little work, Buddhism (published under the direction of the S.P.C.K.), we read: "There is every reason to believe that the Pitakas now extant in Ceylon are substantially identical with the books of the Orthodox Canon, as settled at the Council of Patna about the year 250 B.C. As no works would have been received into the canon which were not then believed to be very old, the Pitakas may be approximately placed in the fourth century B.C., and parts of them possibly read back very nearly, if not quite, to the time of Gautama himself." On page 15 it is explained that, when the statements in the Sanscrit and Pali texts agree, the greatest reliance may be placed upon them, "not indeed as to the actual facts of Gautama's life, but as to the belief of the early Buddhists concerning it." Professor Rhys Davids enumerates the more important of these early beliefs, and they include many of the startling coincidences which I have noticed. The later beliefs he passes over for the most part in silence; but, speaking generally, he is of opinion that the greater portion, if not all, of the legends could be explained by hero-worship, mere poetical imagery, misapprehension, the desire to edify, applications to Gautama of previously existing stories or sun-myths, and so on. Nowhere does he state or imply that in any of the legends, early or late, there can be any application to Gautama of the Gospel stories of the life of Christ; while he considers M. Senart's theory of the almost complete dependence of the Buddha legends on solar myths "most interesting." Now, it is just those very ideas of virgin-birth, resurrection, and ascension appearing in the later legends which were nothing more nor less than solar myths. In any case, whatever their origin, they were world-wide very many centuries before the Christian era; so any argument from the lateness of these legends is founded upon sand. In his Buddhism, as also in his article on Buddhism in the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Professor steers clear of the question of the parallels; but in his Buddhist Suttas, translated by him from the Pali and appearing in the "Sacred Books of the East" series, we read (in the Introduction, p. 165) that while he "ventures to disagree with writers who argue that the resemblances in the Pali Pitakas and passages in the New Testament indicate that the New Testament as the later must be borrowed," he holds that the resemblance is due not to any borrowing on the one side or the other, but "solely to the similarity of the conditions under which the two movements grew" [and, the Rationalist would add, a similarity in the myths afloat is a part, and a very essential part, of the similarity of the conditions].