At the time of the advent of Gotama the people of India were in possession of a civilization remarkable in many respects, but most remarkable, perhaps, in the freedom and latitude of thought prevalent. It is difficult for many who have been brought up within the contracted influences of those who regard all alien religions and non-Christian countries as so many black spots on the pages of history and on the maps of the world, and who have been surrounded in their youth by the innumerable restrictions placed upon all speculative propensities, to realize that, at the time when they were mere cave-dwellers and unclothed sojourners with the beasts of the field, a great and lofty civilization was existent in what they would possibly consider a barbarous corner of the globe, and that a people there held dominion whose chief intellectual pastime was to range over the vast domains of speculative thought and all the interminable mysteries of life. The Indian has been a philosopher by birth and breeding from time immemorial; and only among a race of philosophers could such a religion as Buddhism, with its sudden iconoclasm, have been preached with so little opposition, and have taken root so rapidly, when we come to consider the strong hold the Brahmanical ceremonial had upon the people at that time. With the inception of Christianity, however, the case was very different. At the birth of Jesus the inhabitants of Palestine, with the exception of the Essenes, were sunk low in the mire of bigotry, prejudice, and priestly domination. The mind of the people was less philosophically prepared to grasp a broad and exalted creed such as essential Christianity; it required dogmas more definite, doctrines more easily comprehended; and Jesus had perforce to mould his utterances to the temperament and mental capacity of the people among whom he preached. To the east of the Holy Land was India, with its refined and more perfect civilization; to the west, Central Europe, with its savage and ignorant tribes, worshippers of trees, and in servitude to many superstitious practices and customs. Christianity, with its immense potential resources, its innate power for good, required some outlet for its activities; and, as was only natural, it spread in the direction where a pure and sublime religion was most needed, and experienced little difficulty in eventually conquering the savage intellect of Central Europe. Becoming appropriated by men who, living in the far North, depended for their very life upon a ceaseless struggle with adverse circumstances, it gradually lost the softening and refining influences which are so characteristic of the Oriental temperament, and became the vehicle for the passions and ambitions of a race more brutal and more unsympathetic than that among which it took its rise.