rom the New Testament,
but unfortunately for them, their premises are untenable. Prof. Monier
Williams, _the_ accepted authority on Hindooism, and a thorough
Christian, writing for the "Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,"
knowing that he could not very well overlook this subject in speaking of
the _Bhagavad-gita_, says:

"To any one who has followed me in tracing the outline of this
remarkable philosophical dialogue, and has noted the numerous
parallels it offers to passages in _our_ Sacred Scriptures, it
may seem strange that I hesitate to concur to any theory which
explains these coincidences by supposing that the author had
access to the New Testament, or that he derived some of his
ideas from the first propagaters of Christianity. Surely it
will be conceded that the probability of contact and
interaction between Gentile systems and the Christian religion
of the first two centuries of our era must have been greater
in Italy than in India. Yet, if we take the writings and
sayings of those great Roman philosophers, Seneca, Epictetus,
and Marcus Aurelius, we shall find them full of resemblances
to passages in our Scriptures, while their appears to be no
ground whatever for supposing that these eminent Pagan writers
and thinkers derived any of their ideas from either Jewish or
Christian sources. In fact, the Rev. F. W. Farrar, in his
interesting and valuable work 'Seekers after God,' has clearly
shown that 'to say that Pagan morality kindled its faded taper
at the Gospel light, whether furtively or unconsciously, that
it dissembled the obligation and made a boast of the splendor,
as if it were originally her own, is to make an assertion
wholly untenable.' He points out that the attempts of the
Christian Fathers to make out Pythagoras a debtor to Hebraic
wisdom, Plato an 'Atticizing Moses,' Aristotle a picker-up of
ethics from a Jew, Seneca a correspondent of St. Paul, were
due 'in some cases to ignorance, in some to a want of perfect
honesty in controversial dealing.'[287:2]

"_His arguments would be even more conclusive if applied to
the Bhagavad-gita_, the author of which was probably
contemporaneous with Seneca.[287:3] It must, indeed, be
admitted that the flames of true light which emerge from the
mists of pantheism in the writings of Indian ph