the chief object of worship, the divine helper on whom all dependence was placed.  This mythical being was really the God of northern Buddhism in the Middle Ages, and is the popular sympathizer of all Mongolian races to the present day.  In Thibet he is supposed to be incarnate in the Grand Lama.  In China he is incarnate in Quanyen, the goddess of mercy.  With sailors she is the goddess of the sea.  In many temples she is invoked by the sick, the halt, the blind, the impoverished.  Her images are sometimes represented with a hundred arms to symbolize her omnipotence to save.  Beal says of this, as Banergea says of the faith element of the Krishna cult, that it is wholly alien to the religion whose name it bears:  it is not Buddhism.  He thinks that it has been greatly affected by Christian influences.

Another mythical being who is worshipped as God in China and Japan, is Amitabba, a Dhyana or celestial Buddha, who in long kalpas of Time has acquired merit enough for the whole world.  Two of the twelve Buddhist sects of Japan have abandoned every principle taught by Gautama, except his ethics, and have cast themselves upon the free grace of Amitabba.  They have exchanged the old atheism for theism.  They have given up all dependence on merit-making and self-help; they now rely wholly on the infinite merit of another.  Their religious duties are performed out of gratitude for a free salvation wrought out for them, and no longer as the means of gaining heaven.  They live by a faith which works by love.  They expect at death an immediate transfer to a permanent heaven, instead of a series of transmigrations.  Their Buddha is not dead, but he ever liveth to receive into his heavenly realm all who accept his grace, and to admit them to his divine fellowship forever.  By a direct and complete imputation they are made sharers in his righteousness, and become joint heirs in his heavenly inheritance.  Whatever the genesis of these strange cults which now prevail as the chief religious beliefs among the Mongolian races, they are marvellously significant.  They have come almost to the very threshold of Christianity.  What they need is the true Saviour and not a myth, a living faith and not an empty delusion.  Nevertheless, they prove that faith in a divine salvation is the only religion that can meet the wants of the human soul.

There is something very encouraging in these approaches toward the great doctrines of salvation.  I do not believe that these sects have come so near to the true Messiah without the influence of the Spirit of God, and without more or less light from Christian sources.  But partly they have been moved by those wants which Hinduism and Buddhism could not satisfy.  The principle of their faith is worthy of recognition, and the missionary should say as Paul said:  “Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.”