Chanakya, Zacha, or, as our registers have it, Macha,[335] one of the personifications of Budh, the general appellative of those heaven-sent devotees, was so startling a paragon of human impeccability, as to inspire his followers with the conviction of his being an incarnation of the Godhead. He is stated to have been the son of one of the most powerful of eastern kings; but, according to their preconceived notions of the future Redeemer, born of his mother without any knowledge of the other sex. The circumstances attendant upon his infantine education, and the precocity of his parts, favoured an inauguration upon which their fancies had been long riveted. After a laborious ordeal of pious austerity, not without miraculous proofs and other intimations of Divine approval, he was duly admitted to the honour of canonisation, and entered, accordingly, upon his task of consigned Saviour of the world. The encounters with which he had to contend, in this uphill work, against flesh and blood, were those which were, afterwards, again combated by the _admitted_ Saviour whom he had personated. The same faults he reprehended; the same weakness he deplored; the same hypocrisy he rebuked; and the same virtues he inculcated. The purification of the inner spirit was the object which both professed, and the improvement of human morals in social intercourse and relation, the evidence in practice, upon which both equally insisted. If Christ promised a _heaven_ to the votaries of His truths, Budha did a _nirwana_ to his disciples and imitators: and though the former place, to our imagination, sounds _replete with all delights_, while the latter is merely figured as exempt from all _painfulness_, yet _both_ agree in one particular, not a little soothing to wounded hope, in being essentially such, as where “the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary are at rest.” But great as was the resemblance which the personal example and the doctrinal lessons of Macha and Christ bore to one another, it was as nothing compared to the almost incredible similitude of their respective departures. They both died the inglorious death of the _cross_ to reconcile man to his offended Creator; and in confident dependence upon the best authenticated assurance, exulted on the occasion, however galling the process, of expiating, by their own sufferings, the accumulated sins of humanity. Is it to be wondered at, therefore, that the traces which they have left behind them, in their different ages, should bear an analogy to one another? Or would not the wonder rather be that they did not, in all respects, harmonise?