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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,
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