tin, showed the feeling of the older race of
biblical students.

But researches went on. Bopp, Burnouf, Lassen, Weber, Whitney, Max
Muller, and others continued the work during the nineteenth century.
More and more evident became the sources from which many ideas and
narratives in our own sacred books had been developed. Studies in the
sacred books of Brahmanism, and in the institutions of Buddhism, the
most widespread of all religions, its devotees outnumbering those of all
branches of the Christian Church together, proved especially fruitful in
facts relating to general sacred literature and early European religious
ideas.

Noteworthy in the progress of this knowledge was the work of Fathers Huc
and Gabet. In 1839 the former of these, a French Lazarist priest, set
out on a mission to China. Having prepared himself at Macao by eighteen
months of hard study, and having arrayed himself like a native, even to
the wearing of the queue and the staining of his skin, he visited Peking
and penetrated Mongolia. Five years later, taking Gabet with him, both
disguised as Lamas, he began his long and toilsome journey to the chief
seats of Buddhism in Thibet, and, after two years of fearful dangers
and sufferings, accomplished it. Driven out finally by the Chinese,
Huc returned to Europe in 1852, having made one of the most heroic,
self-denying, and, as it turned out, one of the most valuable efforts
in all the noble annals of Christian missions. His accounts of these
journevs, written in a style simple, clear, and interesting, at once
attracted attention throughout the world. But far more important than
any services he had rendered to the Church he served was the influence
of his book upon the general opinions of thinking men; for he completed
a series of revelations made by earlier, less gifted, and less
devoted travellers, and brought to the notice of the world the amazing
similarity of the ideas, institutions, observances, ceremonies, and
ritual, and even the ecclesiastical costumes of the Buddhists to those
of his own Church.

Buddhism was thus shown with its hierarchy, in which the Grand Lama, an
infallible representative of the Most High, is surrounded by its
minor Lamas, much like cardinals; with its bishops wearing mitres, its
celibate priests with shaven crown, cope, dalmatic, and censer; its
cathedrals with clergy gathered in the choir; its vast monasteries
filled with monks and nuns vowed to poverty, chastity, and ob