een adopted by
different nations or districts. Obviously, if we take the stricter
definition, the question at issue can be decided only by an appeal to
facts. Whether or not a given religion has actually been universally
accepted can be determined from statistics, and the question whether it
is fitted to be generally adopted must be answered by a similar appeal.
It may be held, and is held, of various religions that their standards
are so high and their schemes of worship and conceptions of salvation so
obviously suited to human nature that they cannot fail to be adopted
when they are known; but such are the diversities of human thought that
this consideration cannot be regarded as decisive--a religious system
that seems to one set of men to be perfect may appear to others to be
unsatisfactory,[2088] and it is only by trial that it can be determined
how far it is capable of conquering new territory. The test of actual
diffusion, then, must be applied to those religions for which the claim
to universality has been made--these are Buddhism, Judaism,
Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Islam.[2089]

+1142+. Buddhism has had a history full of vicissitudes.[2090] Beginning
in Northern India as an Aryan faith, in the course of a few centuries it
overran a great part of the peninsula, then began to decline, gradually
lost its hold on the people, partly, it is said, by reason of the
corruption of its morals, chiefly, doubtless, because it was not suited
to the character of the Hindu people, and finally, in the twelfth
century of our era, left its native land, to which it has never
returned. Meantime it had established itself firmly in Ceylon and later
in Burma and Siam and had been carried to China (not long after the
beginning of our era), whence it passed to Korea, Central Asia, Japan,
and adjacent islands, and as early as the sixth century gained a footing
in Tibet. It has maintained its conquests outside of India to the
present day, except that it has been driven out of a considerable part
of Central Asia by Mohammedanism; in China and Japan it exists alongside
of the native cults, its relations with which are friendly. It presents
the curious spectacle of a religion, originally Hindu Aryan, that now
finds a home exclusively (with one exception, Ceylon) among non-Aryan
peoples; but among these peoples it has generally been degraded by the
infusion of low native elements, and has discarded its original essence.
By reason of it