em are now lost. What have been retained
in the present Canon may doubtless be regarded as the least
objectionable. And yet we must not hastily adopt even this conclusion,
for you know that Sabina, Bishop of Heracha, himself speaking of the
Council of Nicea, affirms that "except Constantine and Sabinus, Bishop
of Pamphilus, these bishops were a set of illiterate, simple creatures
that understood nothing"; which is as though he had said they were a
pack of fools. And Pappus, in his _Synodicon_ to that Council of
Nicea, lets us into the secret that the Canon was not decided by a
careful comparison of several gospels before them, but by a _lottery_.
Having, he tells us, "promiscuously put all the books that were
referred to the Council for determination under a Communion table in a
church, they (the bishops) besought the Lord that the inspired
writings might get up on the table, while the spurious writings
remained underneath, and _it happened accordingly_".

But letting all this pass and looking only to what is contained in the
present Canon, we see the same tendency to compel all nature to attest
the divinity of the writer's hero. At the nativity a star leaves its
orbit and leads the Persian astrologers to the divine child, and angels
come and converse with shepherds, and a whole train of like celestial
phenomena occurs at various stages of his earthly career, which closes
amid earthquakes, a pall of darkness over the whole scene, a
supernatural war of the elements, the opening of graves and the walking
about of their tenants, and other appalling wonders. Now, if the candid
Buddhist concedes that the real history of Gautama is embellished by
like absurd exaggerations, and if we can find their duplicates in the
biographies of Zoroaster, Shankaracharya and other real personages of
antiquity, have we not the right to conclude that the true history of
the Founder of Christianity, if at this late date it were possible to
write it, would be very different from the narratives that pass current?
We must not forget that Jerusalem was at that time a Roman dependency,
just as Ceylon is now a British, and that the silence of contemporary
Roman historians about any such violent disturbances of the equilibrium
of nature is deeply significant.

I have cited this example for the sole and simple purpose of bringing
home to the non-Buddhistic portion of my present audience the
conviction that, in considering the life of Sakya Muni and th