First came a book of "sayings" only. Then a gospel was constructed--the Gospel of the Hebrews--of which only a small fragment can be restored. This was the basis of many other gospels. At the date of Irenæus (180 A.D.) they were very numerous. (Hœr i. 19.) As only the Old Testament, at that time, was considered the Bible, the composers of these gospels apparently thought it no great sin to draw on the Alexandrine library of Buddhist books for much of their matter, it being a maxim of both the Essenes and the early Christians that a holy book was more allegory than history. But before I compare the Buddhist and Christian narratives, I must say a word about the early religion of the Jews. CHAPTER I. _Moses._ Until within the last forty years the Old Testament has been practically a sealed book. It found interpreters, no doubt--two great groups. The first group pointed to its useless and arbitrary edicts, and pronounced them the inventions of priests inspired by fraud and greed. The second group practically admitted the arbitrary and useless nature of most of the edicts, but maintained that they were given by the All-wise, in a book penned by His finger, to miraculously prepare a nation distinct from the other nations of the earth, for a special purpose. They were "types" of a higher revelation, a "better covenant." Practically, with both of these interpreters Mosaism was a pure comedy. But comparative mythology, unborn yesterday, is telling a different story. It shows that the religion of the Jews, far from having been a distinct religion miraculously given to a peculiar people, had the same rites and gods as the creeds of its Semitic neighbours. It shows us these Semites, or descendants of Shem, in two great groups, differing much in language and religion. It shows us the southern Semites, the Arabs, the Himyarites, the Ethiopians. It shows us the northern group, the Babylonians or Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Arameans, the Canaanites, the Hebrews. It shows us their gods, El and Yahve, and Astarte of Sidon; and going a step back shows how the Semites borrowed from an earlier civilisation, that of the Acadians, the yellow-faced Mongols who seem to have preceded the white races everywhere. "The Semite borrowed the old Acadian pantheon _en bloc_," says Professor Sayce ("Ancient Empires," p. 151). But the work of the archæologist and the anthropologist has been still more important. The former has suddenly revealed to us chapters in the history of human experience hitherto undreamt of. He has allowed us to peer far, far into the past, to see man at an incalculable distance.