evil and doing good, and that
we must overcome evil by good and hatred by love, and that there is a
spiritual world and life after death embodied in the teachings of
Buddha--instead of finding in this great fact new proof of the common
Father's love for all His children, they immediately began to indulge
in conjectures as to how these truths might have been derived from the
early Christians who visited the East, while those who were disposed to
reject the claims of Christianity have exhausted research and
conjecture to find something looking as if Christianity itself might
have been derived from the Buddhist missionaries to Palestine and
Egypt, both overlooking the remarkable fact that it is only in
fundamental truths that the two religions agree, while in the dogmas,
legends, creeds and speculations which form the wall of separation
between them they are as wide asunder as the poles.

How comes it on the one theory that the Nestorians, whose peculiar
creed had already separated them from the balance of the Christian
church, taught their Buddhist disciples no part of that creed to which
they have adhered with such tenacity through the ages? And on the
other theory, how comes it, if the Divine Master was, as some modern
writers claim, an Essene, that is, a Buddhist monk, that there is not
in all his teachings a trace of the speculations and legends which had
already buried the fundamental truths of Buddhism almost out of sight?

How sad to hear a distinguished Christian scholar like Sir Monier
Williams cautioning his readers against giving a Christian meaning to
the Christian expressions he constantly met with in Buddhism, and yet
informing them that a learned and distinguished Japanese gentleman told
him it was a source of great delight to him to find so many of his most
cherished religious beliefs in the New Testament; and to see an earnest
Christian missionary like good Father Huc, when in the busy city of
Lha-ssa, on the approach of evening, at the sound of a bell the whole
population sunk on their knees in a concert of prayer, only finding in
it an attempt of Satan to counterfeit Christian worship; and on the
other hand to see ancient and modern learning ransacked to prove that
the brightest and clearest light that ever burst upon a sinful and
benighted world was but the reflected rays of another faith.

And yet this same Sir Monier Williams says: "We shall not be far wrong
in attempting an outline of the Buddha