Meanwhile, to all sincere and inquiring Theosophists, we will say plainly, it is useless for any one to speculate about the date of our Lord Sanggyas’s birth, while rejecting a priori all the Brahmanical, Ceylonese, Chinese, and Tibetan dates.  The pretext that these do not agree with the chronology of a handful of Greeks who visited the country 300 years after the event in question, is too fallacious and bold.  Greece was never concerned with Buddhism, and besides the fact that the classics furnish their few synchronistic dates simply upon the hearsay of their respective authors—­a few Greeks, who themselves lived centuries before the writers quoted—­their chronology is itself too defective, and their historical records, when it was a question of national triumphs, too bombastic and often too diametrically opposed to fact, to inspire with confidence any one less prejudiced than the average European Orientalist.  To seek to establish the true dates in Indian history by connecting its events with the mythical “invasion,” while confessing that “one would look in vain in the literature of the Brahmans or Buddhists for any allusion to Alexander’s conquest, and although it is impossible to identify any of the historical events related by Alexander’s companions with the historical tradition of India,” amounts to something more than a mere exhibition of incompetence in this direction:  were not Prof.  Max Muller the party concerned—­we might say that it appears almost like predetermined dishonesty.

These are harsh words to say, and calculated no doubt to shock many a European mind trained to look up to what is termed “scientific authority” with a feeling akin to that of the savage for his family fetich.  They are well deserved, nevertheless, as a few examples will show.  To such intellects as Prof.  Weber’s—­whom we take as the leader of the German Orientalists of the type of Christophiles—­certainly the word “obtuseness” cannot be applied.  Upon seeing how chronology is deliberately and maliciously perverted in favour of “Greek influence,” Christian interests and his own predetermined theories—­another, and even a stronger term should be applied.  What expression is too severe to signify one’s feelings upon reading such an unwitting confession of disingenuous scholarship as Weber repeatedly makes ("Hist.  Ind.  Lit.”) when urging the necessity of admitting that a passage “has been touched up by later interpellation,” or forcing fanciful chronological places for texts admittedly very ancient—­“as otherwise the dates would be brought down too far or too near!” And this is the keynote of his entire policy:  fiat hypothesis, ruat caelum!  On the other hand Prof.  Max Muller, enthusiastic Indophile as he seems, crams centuries into his chronological thimble without the smallest apparent compunction....