As a rule infidels are the most credulous of all people. The reason of this is evident; infidelity is more a matter of the heart than of the head; it is guided more by natural feeling than by judgment. A man may naturally be a thorough-going infidel; he can be a genuine Christian only by conviction and conversion. Hence it follows that the latter may be expected to be guided by reason and argument rather than the former. Many of our readers may remember the account given by a traveler, of some Catholics who visited a pagoda for the first time, among Oriental pagans, and who, at first, thought they were in a Catholic Church, when they saw the wax tapers, the incense, the vestments of the priests, etc. But on learning their mistake they concluded that these pagan rites were copied from the church. But on reading the history of the church we learn that many of these rites were borrowed from the pagans by the church of Rome, and converted into Christian ceremonies for the purpose of more readily bringing the multitudes into the communion of the church. As to this we are not left in doubt; there are too many known facts which attest it. But these rites are altogether distinct from the fundamental doctrines of the Bible; the rites as compared to the doctrines are modern. In their use the pagans have the priority. Now in some of the Oriental religions are found some resemblances to the doctrines of Christianity, and infidels have been in high glee over the supposed fact that Christianity has copied its facts and doctrines from the heathen religions. But in this249they have drawn their conclusions without research; without diligent inquiry as to which was the original and which the copy. Explorations and investigations of truly scientific men are constantly proving that the Bible is the original source of these doctrines. Christianity rests upon a series of facts from the time of creation to the kingdom of Israel, recorded by "Moses and the prophets." This should be a suggestion to those who, to conciliate the skeptics, are admitting the unreliability of the Mosaic records. They are uselessly and fatally yielding the foundations of the faith they profess. But our object is to call attention to some evidence recently presented in England that Buddhism has copied many of the peculiarities of its belief from the Bible and from Christianity. Infidels gain nothing at all by tracing resemblances; the question is only settled by the chronology of the two systems. We invite the careful attention of the reader to the following extract:— At the last large meeting held in February by the Victoria (Philosophical) Institute, 7 Adelphi Terrace, London, a paper was read by the Rev. R. C. Collins, M. A., on Buddhism in relation to Christianity. Referring to the parallels between the persons and characters of Buddha and Jesus Christ, he said: Take, as a prominent instance, the birth stories. I need not here give details, which are to be found in any modern work on Buddhism. The supposed miraculous conception; the bringing down of Buddha from the Tusita heaven; the Devas acknowledging his supremacy; the presentation in the temple, when the images of Indra and the other gods threw themselves at his feet; the temptation by Mara—which legends are embellished by the modern writer I have already quoted, under such as "Conceived by the Holy Ghost," "Born of the Virgin Maya," "Song of the heavenly host," "Presentation in the temple and temptation in the wilderness,"—none of these is found in the early Pali texts. The simple story of ancient Buddhism is that an ascetic, whose family name was Gautama, preached a new doctrine of human suffering and a new way of deliverance from it. There is no thought in the early Buddhism, of which we read in the Pali texts, of deliverance at the hands of a god; but the man Gautama Buddha stands alone in his striving after the true emancipation from sorrow and ignorance. The accounts of his descending from heaven and being conceived in the world of men, when a preternatural light shone over the worlds, the blind received sight, the dumb sang, the lame danced, the sick were cured, together with all such embellishments, are certainly added by later hands; and if here we recognize some rather remarkable likenesses in thought or expression to things familiar to us in our Bibles, we need not be astonished, when we reflect how great must have been the influence, as I have before hinted, of the Christian story in India in the early centuries of the Christian era, and, perhaps, long subsequently. This is a point which has been much overlooked; but it is abundantly evident from, among other proofs, the story of the god Krishna, which is a manifest parody of the history of Christ. The Bhagavat-Gita, a theosophical poem put into the mouth of Krishna, is something unique among the productions of the East, containing many gems of what we should call Christian truth wrested from their proper setting to adorn this creation of the Brahman poet, and indicating as plainly their origin as do the stories of his life in the Maha-Bharata; so that it has not unreasonably been concluded that the story of Krishna was inserted in the Maha-Bharata to furnish divine sanction to the Bhagavat-Gita. If, then, as there is the strongest reason to believe, the Christian story, somewhere between the first and tenth centuries of the Christian era, forced itself into the great Hindoo epic, and was at the foundation of the most remarkable poem that ever saw the light in India, can we be surprised if we find similarly borrowed and imitated wonders in the later Buddhist stories also? Several Home and Colonial applications to join the Institute as guinea subscribers were received, and its object being to investigate all philosophical and scientific questions, especially any said to militate against the truth of the Bible, a discussion ensued, in which Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, Professor Leitner from Lahore, Mr. Coles, an earnest student of the question during twenty-five years' residence in Ceylon, Professor Rhys Davids, and others took part—all agreeing in and confirming the statements of Mr. Collins' paper. Dr. Leitner brought a large number of photographs of early Indian and Tartar sculptures, showing the first introduction of the Christian story into those monuments between about the second and tenth centuries, and he pointed out the value of such additional confirmation of Mr. Collins' statements.