dispute. The projected analysis of its contents by the anti-critical school will complete the work. The point which Rationalistic writers have principally sought to establish is the connection of Buddhism with Christianity and the growth of the New Testament from Pagan myths which were adapted to Christ as they had been adapted to Buddha and Confucius. The mere comparison of Christian rites and doctrines (in the unorganized condition) with those of Buddhism fully justifies the Rationalist assumption; still, abundant evidence of their connection is forthcoming.
About 250 B.C. a royal convert to Buddhism, Asoka, was seized with the proselytizing mania, and indulged it with royal bounty. He scattered 80,000 missionaries throughout the known world—through India, China, Japan, Ceylon, Persia, Babylonia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. A passage in his edicts, engraven on a rock at Girnur in Guzerat, shows that Buddhism was planted in the dominion of the Seleucidae and Ptolemies in the third century B.C. The Buddhistic teaching, which had been accepted by large numbers of Jews (retaining the Mosaic Law), comes down to the time of Christ in the sect of the Essenes. Three salient points in the teaching of the Essenes—asceticism, celibacy, and voluntary poverty—are entirely antagonistic to the Hebrew system, and are just as conspicuously Buddhistic. These doctrines are precisely the characteristic features of the teaching of Christ; his individuality only shows itself in his warm sympathy with the wretched and sinful. Of the four Jewish sects of his time Christ denounces three vigorously on all occasions—the Scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees—and never says a word against the Essenes. There is every reason to think that Christ was a member of that sect, and that the distinctive features of his preaching were Essenic, and thus, indirectly, Buddhistic. But the chief influence of Buddhism is apparent in the growth of Christ-legends during the century which followed his death. We have seen that the life of Christ was not committed to documents during the first century, and thus the mythopceic faculty had a license which it is difficult to appreciate in modern times. Gautama had fore told the coming of another angel-messiah in about 600 years: the Galilean must be he. Alexandria had been reached by Asoka's missionaries, and it was there that an
