Two other points remain, the most important of all. The Buddhists have a Trinity, Buddha or Swayambhu, the Self-Existent, Dharma or Prajnâ, which is the same word as Philo's Sophia Wisdom. From these two the Father and the Mother have been produced. Sangha, literally Union, the union of matter and spirit, like St. Paul's Christ, Humanity--ideal Humanity. That a nation so "stiff-necked" as the Jews in the matter of their one God, should have accepted a Trinity, shows certainly a foreign influence. The second point is stronger still. The Buddhist teachers in Persia and Egypt in days before Christ; in Japan, in Islâm, during the Middle Ages; in Europe now,--have had and have one method of procedure. They say practically, "Religion as we conceive it has only one lesson--knowledge of God. This is to be acquired not externally through creeds and priests, but internally by the education and purification of the soul. Keep your Bibles if the weaker brethren insist on them, but explain that they are symbols, not history. Keep your prophets, your Moses, your Mahomet, your Zoroaster, and fasten our teaching on him. Keep your hob-goblins and folklore, but give up your bloody altar." Now, in the view of the Jew, God had made a covenant with Israel, which was to last as long as the sun, the moon, and the stars. In return for the "offerings of the Lord made by fire" (Levit. xxiv. 9) on the temple altar of Jerusalem, Israel was to triumph over its foes and receive every temporal blessing. The advice of the Buddhist was practically that the Jewish half of the bargain was to be broken, but that the Bible, the document containing the contract, was to be retained. _A priori_ could any one have guessed that advice of this sort could be taken? And yet we see the Essenes "allegorize" the bloody altar out of their Bible, but cling to the document more fondly than ever. The early Christians and Justin and Irenæus do the same. Scripture for the early Church was the Old Testament. CHAPTER VI. _The Gospel according to the Hebrews._ Papias, the Bishop of Hieropolis (about A.D. 140), wrote a small sentence which, examined critically recently, has revolutionised all our ideas about the four eye-witnesses of Paley. He tells us that Matthew first in the Hebrew dialect wrote the λόγια (sayings), and each person translated as he was able. This tells us everything. Matthew in Aramaic wrote down all the "sayings" of Christ that he could remember, and our three gospels and a number of other gospels were translations, enlargements, and fanciful versions of this. Matthew's work emerged in the Church at Jerusalem, and was their sole scripture. Jerome (416 A.D.), writing against the Pelagians, says: "In the Gospel according to the Hebrews--which is written, indeed, in the Chaldee and Syriac language, but in Hebrew letters, which the Nazarenes use to this day--according to the Apostles, or, as very many deem, according to Matthew." ("Dial. adv. Pelag.," ch. iii.)