of the Athanasian Creed or the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church which might have interested speculative and ritualistic minds.  Similarly, though intellectual intercourse between India and China was long and fairly intimate and though the influence of Indian thought on China was very great, yet the influence of China on Indian thought is negligible.  This being so, it would be rash to believe without good evidence that, in the past, doctrines which have penetrated Indian literature during centuries and have found acceptance with untold millions owe their origin to obscure foreign colonists or missions.

Writers who wish to prove that Indian religions are indebted to Christianity often approach their task with a certain misconception.  They assume that if at some remote epoch a few stray Christians reached India, they could overcome without difficulty the barriers of language and social usage and further that their doctrine would be accepted as something new and striking which would straightway influence popular superstition and philosophic thought.  But Lyall gives a juster perspective in his poem about the Meditations of a Hindu Prince who, grown sceptical in the quest of truth, listens to the “word of the English,” and finds it: 

    “Naught but the world wide story how the earth and the heavens began,
     How the gods were glad and angry and a deity once was man.”

Many doctrines preached by Christianity such as the love of God, salvation by faith, and the incarnation, had been thought out in India before the Christian era, and when Christian missionaries preached them they probably seemed to thoughtful Hindus a new and not very adequate version of a very old tale.  On the other hand the central and peculiar doctrine of dogmatic Christianity is that the world has been saved by the death of Christ.  If this doctrine of the atonement or the sacrifice of a divine being had appeared in India as an importation from the west, we might justly talk of the influence of Christianity on Indian religion.  But it is unknown in Hinduism and Buddhism or (since it is rash to make absolute statements about these vast and multifarious growths of speculation) it is at any rate exceedingly rare.  These facts create a presumption that the resemblances between Christianity and Indian religion are due to coincidence rather than borrowing, unless borrowing can be clearly proved, and this conclusion, though it may seem tame, is surely a source of satisfaction.  The divagations of human thought are manifold and its conclusions often contradictory, but if there is anything that can be called truth it is but natural that logic, intuition, philosophy, poetry, learning and saintship should in different countries sometimes attain similar results.