The Essenes, who were, from the second century before Christ onwards, domiciled in the Holy Land, although virtually Buddhists, do not seem to have preserved intact the tenets of Gotama, though the ethics remained unadulterated. They retained many of the qualities of the monastic Buddhists, such as asceticism, brotherly love, a rare benevolence towards mankind in general, and the still rarer consideration for animal life. Nor was any departure made from the vows of chastity, the belief in the transitory nature of things, and in their attitude of non-resistance to evil. It was rather with regard to metaphysical obscurities that they wandered from the strict teaching of Gotama; and we cannot wonder that such was the case when we remember the doubts, difficulties, and uncertainties that must have beset the paths of these followers of Gotama when they had no longer the Enlightened One to point to them the way of truth. Especially do they seem to have gone astray in the matter of the doctrine of the soul. This they described "as coming from the subtlest ether, and as lured by the sorcery of nature into the prison-house of the body." The Essenes derived their Buddhistic tenets and practices directly from Gnosticism, which is said to have prevailed in Alexandria two centuries before the birth of Christ, and its existence in that city owed its origin to the importation of Buddhism from India, constant communication having been established in those days between Egypt and the West Coast of India as far north as the mouths of the Indus. Further, the edicts of King Asoka go to prove that at about this time he was on intimate terms and in frequent correspondence with the Greeks; also, that during his reign and under his royal patronage Buddhist missionaries found their way to Egypt, and there scattered the seed from which arose the Gnostics, or Therapeuts, and the kindred sect of the Essenes. Mr. Arthur Lillie, in his _Buddhism in Christendom_, p. 75, writes: "The most subtle thinker of the modern English Church, the late Dean Mansel, boldly maintained that the philosophy and rites of the Therapeuts of Alexandria were due to Buddhist missionaries who visited Egypt within two centuries of the time of Alexander the Great. In this he has been supported by philosophers of the calibre of Schelling and Schopenhauer and the great Sanscrit authority Lassen. Renan, in his work _Les Langues Sémétiques_, also sees traces of this Buddhist propagandism in Palestine before the Christian era. Hilgenfeld, Mutter, Bohlen, King, all admit the Buddhist influence. Colebrooke saw a striking similarity between the Buddhist philosophy and that of the Pythagoreans. Dean Milman was convinced that the Therapeuts sprung from the 'contemplative and indolent fraternities' of India."