No allusion was made either by Jesus or Gotama to the miraculous circumstances said to have attended their nativity; and, although there exist no data for the assumption that the historians of the latter were inspired writers like those of the New Testament, the messianic halo with which Buddhist tradition has encircled the figure of Gotama tends to bring together the personalities of the two reformers into closer pictorial relationship. But this blending of the portraiture cannot be taken in any sense as a help towards wheeling into line the psychological forces in the field of inquiry. Nevertheless, the interest attaching to these traditions as coincidental, and the consideration that the date of the Buddhist chronicles is anterior to that of the New Testament, render them worthy of brief notice. M. Ernest de Bunsen[H] says: "Among a circle of Indians prophecies were accredited which announced the incarnation of an angel, called the Anointed or Messiah, who should bring to earth the Wisdom or Bôdhi from above, and establish the kingdom of heavenly truth and justice. He would be of royal descent, and genealogies would connect him with his ancestors. The 'Blessed One,' the 'God among Gods,' and the 'Saviour of the World' was, according to Buddhistic records, incarnate by the Holy Ghost, of the royal Virgin Maya, and he was born on Christmas Day, the birthday of the Sun, for which reason the Sun became the symbol of Gotama Buddha. To be like Gotama is to reach the ideal[I] which has been set to humanity, and to be like God. Salvation does not depend on any outward act, but on a change or renewal of the mind, or a reform of the inner nature, or faith in the innate guiding power of God, of which the celestial Buddha, incarnated in Gotama, was held to be the highest organ. The saving faith, therefore, was brought by, and centred in, the incarnate Angel-Messiah, the Saviour of the World. Salvation is by faith, and faith comes by the Maya, the Spirit or Word of God, of which Gotama, the Angel-Messiah, was regarded as the divinely-chosen and incarnate messenger, the Vicar of God, and God himself on earth. According to Chinese-Buddhistic writings, it was the Holy Ghost, or Shing-Su, which descended on the Virgin Maya. The effect produced by this miracle is thus summed up in the most ancient Chinese life of Buddha which we at present possess, translated between A.D. 25 and 190: 'If the child born from this conception be induced to lead a secular life, he shall become a universal monarch; but if he leaves his home, and becomes a religious person, then he shall become Buddha, and shall save the world.'" [H] _The Angel-Messiah of Buddhists, Essenes, and Christians_, pp. 25, 32. [I] "Jesus is the father of all those who seek in dreams of the ideal the repose of their souls" (Renan).