century,
wrote a work "against Christians"; but again, according to Harnack, the
work is not directed against Christ, or what Porphyry regarded as the
teaching of Christ. It was directed against the Christians of his day
and against the sacred books, which according to Porphyry were written
by impostors and ignorant people. There we have the double mind of
educated India,--homage to Christ, opposition to His Church. There also
we have the standpoint of Sahib Mirza Gholam Ahmad of Qadian. Some, we
read, being taught by the Neo-Platonists that there was little
difference between the ancient religion, rightly explained and restored
to its purity, and the religion which Christ really taught, not that
corrupted form of it which His disciples professed, concluded it best
for them to remain among those who worshipped the gods. There is the
present Indian willingness to discover Christian and modern ideas in the
Hindu Scriptures, especially in the original Vedas that the new [=A]rya
sect declare to be "the Scripture of true knowledge." The practical
outcome of the Neo-Platonic movement was an attempt to revive the old
Graeco-Roman religion,--Julian the apostate emperor had many with him.
There we have the revival of the worship of Krishna in India, and the
apologies for idolatry and caste. The most recent stage of the
Theosophical Society in India reveals _it_ as virtually a Hindu revival
society. Finally, we read, the old philosopher Pythagoras, Apollonius of
Tyana, and others were represented on the stage dressed in imitation of
Christ Himself, and the Emperor Alexander Severus [A.D. 222-235] placed
the figure of Christ in his lararium alongside of those of Abraham,
Orpheus, and Apollonius. There we have the modern Indians who fully
recognise Christ alongside of their own avatars. The whole parallel is
complete.[105] In spite of the feebleness and, it may be, unworthiness
of His Church, through the force of Christ's personality, the Roman
history of the second, third, and fourth centuries has been repeating
itself in India in the nineteenth and twentieth, and unless the force of
Christ's personality be spent, the parallels will proceed.

From new reasonings about God, her new monotheism, New India has been
brought a stage farther to actual history. From theologies she has come
to the first three Gospels. New India has been introduced to Christ as
He actually lived on earth before men's eyes; and to India, intensely
intereste