It is an age of wonders, this nineteenth century of ours, but it is still a remarkable experience to find oneself, even in print, cheek by jowl with an apostle. Imagine then my astonishment on Monday mornin, to see my humble appellation—in capital too—in juxtaposition with the illustrious apostle and explorer St. Thomas. I declare I would not have changed places with any of those much envied persons who occupied the Albert Hall platform on Stanley's return. I am in additional debt to P. D. for the pleasant courtesy of his letter, to which I would be sorry to offer any controversial reply. And indeed it would be impossible within proper limits to deal adequately with questions as obscure as they are interesting. But in some instances the obscurity of the object appears to have been rivalled by the want of lucidity in my comments. What I tried to express, and failed, is this Phere are in modern Chinese Buddhi some striking resemblances to Romai Catholicism, of which I enumerated seven, viz., the Trinity, Kwanyin and child, the incense, the genuflexions, the bell, and, lastly, the images and pictures, Now it is obvious that these resemblances may be accounted for in two different ways, according as you approach the subject from the historical or philosophical side. You may argue on the one hand that from the continuity of religious intercourse betw East and West from the earliest times, iti reasonable to infer that, as the Christians @id not copy from the Buddhists, the Bud-Ahists must-have borrowed from the Christians, The inference is a perfectly fair one, but it rests of course with those who adopt the historical method to first of all establish pet their premises. The evidence, suchasit is, has been carefully sifted by Pauthier, Klaproth, Remusat and several others, aniovg whom Hue and Yule are worth mentioning as enquirers who approached the subject from the same side but after radically different methods. Both of them deal in particular with the supposed visit of St. Thomas to China, which seems to me to be a cardinal point in the argument. If that were established we should have to begin our researches But how is it to be proved First is the famous passage in the Chaldean Breviary of the old Malabar Church By St. Thomas were the Chinese and the Ethiopians converted to the truth," And then you go on to give a host of quotations to show that St. Thomas went to India and that tradition indicates that from there he made his way to China. Huc has shown the most industry in collecting passages bearing on the subject. He quotes among others Abdias, Fabricius, Gregorius, Doro-St. Jerome, Theodoret, Nicephorus, udentius, Sophronius, and, Inter, Gre-Siioburn. Curiously enough he omits, if ory of Tours and Sighelm, Bishop of Tam not mistaken, to refer to Arnobius where testimony, which dates from the third century, is of the highest importance. But Huc wanted no farther proof. He believed those writers to be truthful men. They believed the journey to India to be a historic fact and they said so. What more would you have? Will you doubt the word of a Theodorct or a St. Jerome?
After such a manner is the historic argument too often conducted. It is surely one thing to call a man untruthful and another to say that he may be mistaken. What we have to consider is not his veracity but his credibility. Are the grounds on which he formed his conviction sufficient to convince us Now as faras I can judge all that Huc was able to gather together, however interesting otherwise, is of very little value qua evidence. Iam well aware, however, that many attach a very different weight to the authorities he cities, but I cannot help thinking that quite unconsciously they have allowed their historical opinions to be biassed by their religious convictions. I have seen nothing which has added to the evid-nce which Hue and Yule have brought together, and so far it is impossible to resist a verdict of 'Not Proven." All that we can say is that there appears to have been very early religious intercourse with China, but the extent to which one religion borrowed from the other must in' the: meantime remain very much a matter of individual opi which will differ with the historical method is based on too few data, and is altogether too fanciful to be credible. There seems to me no need to go so far afield when there is a natural explanation close at hand. To take the specific cases to which I referred, why should the Chine have borrowed their idea of a Trinity from Roman Catholicism when the conception was perfectly familiar to the Brahmanic system (Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva) of which Buddhism is only an_ offshoot. An anyone cares to argu¢ that the concept is indigenous to China he will not be without justification. It has been suggested that the sacred tripod of Confucius sym-bolised the tri-une God, and the idea has been discovered in too many place the mot dians, for instance—to render its existence unlikely-among the North American In-in China improbable.
The same remark ies to Kwanyin with the child in her arms, It is only another instance of thropomorphism striving to represent la the concrete an abstract idea of humanity; of all ideas one of the tenderest. and most pitiful. It would indeed ing strange {fo dnd it absent in " country like Moed not here allude to the pictures and images, to the posture adopted in prayer, joense as a symbol of the ascending ion; they are so obviously the concrete expressions of human desire all the world over.
Our gods are what we make them, saya Renan, and in that remark, ungraceful and even coarse though it be, there lurks a profound truth, God has' not left without witness. The divine idea permeates mankind is one, The constitu tion of the human mind which leads us to think in triplets and reason in all the same, and the representa and image of the divine are at of its limitations, and of the inability human to realise the divine, or, as Kant would put it, of the conditioned to comprehend the absolute, Tam far from saying that Buddhism has no plumes borrowed from Christianity, On the contrary, I am persuaded that unconsciously it was both modified by the early Nestorians who came to China, and influenced by the reports of Chinese travellers from India, but all the resemblances to which I have referred are long anterior to those events so far as our present knowledge of them goes, and, it appears to me, ray be sufficiently accounted for without them, Saw Beports,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.