It is equally inconceivable that the Christian fathers should have copied Buddhism.  They resisted Persian mysticism as the work of the Devil, and it was in that mysticism, if anywhere, that Buddhist influence existed in the Levant.  Whoever has read Tertullian’s withering condemnation of Marcion may judge how far the fathers of the Church favored the heresies of the East.  Augustine had himself been a Manichean mystic, and when after his conversion he became the great theologian of the Church, he must have known whether the teachings of the Buddha were being palmed off on the Christian world.  The great leaders of that age were men of thorough scholarship and of the deepest moral earnestness.  Many of them gave up their possessions and devoted their lives to the promotion of the truths which they professed.  Scores of them sealed their faith by martyr deaths.

But even if we were to accept the flippant allegation that they were all impostors, yet we should be met by an equally insurmountable difficulty in the utter silence of the able and bitter assailants of Christianity in the first two or three centuries.  Celsus prepared himself for his well-known attack on Christianity with the utmost care, searching history, philosophy, and every known religion from which he could derive an argument against the Christian faith.

Why did he not strike at the very root of the matter by exposing those stupid plagiarists who were attempting to play off upon the intelligence of the Roman world a clumsy imitation of the far-famed Buddha?  It was the very kind of thing that the enemies of Christianity wanted.  Why should the adroit Porphyry attempt to work up a few mere scraps of resemblance from the life of Pythagoras, when all he had to do was to lay his hand upon familiar legends which afforded an abundance of the very thing in demand?

Again, it is to be remembered that Christianity has always been restrictive and opposed to admixtures with other systems.  It repelled the Neo-Platonism of Alexandria, and it fought for two or three centuries against Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and similar heresies:  and the assumption, in the face of all this, that the Christian Church went out of its way to copy Indian Buddhism, must be due either to gross ignorance or to reckless misrepresentation.  On the other hand, it is in accordance with the very genius of Buddhism to borrow.  It has absorbed every indigenous superstition and entered into partnership with every local religious system, from the Devil Worship of Burmah and Ceylon to the Taouism of China and the Shinto of Japan.  In its long-continued contact with Christianity it has changed from the original atheism of Gautama to various forms of theism, and in some of its sects, at least, from a stanch insistance on self-help alone to an out-and-out doctrine of salvation by faith.  This is true of the Shin and Yodo sects of Japan.  From recognizing no God at all at first, Buddhism had, by the seventh century A.D., a veritable Trinity,