enable Buddhists and
Christians to see eye to eye and something to promote peace and
good-will among men.

While following my own conceptions and even fancies in many things, I
believe the leading characters and incidents to be historical, and I
have given nothing as the teaching of the great master which was not to
my mind clearly authenticated.

To those who have read so much about agnostic Buddhism, and about
Nirvana meaning annihilation, it may seem bold in me to present Buddha
as an undoubting believer in the fundamental truths of all religion,
and as not only a believer in a spiritual world but an actual visitor
to its sad and blissful scenes; but the only agnosticism I have been
able to trace to Buddha was a want of faith in the many ways invented
through the ages to escape the consequences of sin and to avoid the
necessity of personal purification, and the only annihilation he taught
and yearned for was the annihilation of self in the highest Christian
sense, and escape from that body of death from which the Apostle Paul
so earnestly sought deliverance.

Doubtless agnosticism and almost every form of belief and unbelief
subsequently sprang up among the intensely acute and speculative
peoples of the East known under the general name of Buddhists, as they
did among the less acute and speculative peoples of the West known as
Christians; but the one is no more primitive Buddhism than the other is
primitive Christianity.

While there are innumerable poetic legends--of which Spence Hardy's
"Manual of Buddhism" is a great storehouse, and many of which are given
by Arnold in his beautiful poem--strewn thick along the track of
Buddhist literature, constantly tempting one to leave the straight path
of the development of a great religion, I have carefully avoided what
did not commend itself to my mind as either historical or spiritual
truth.

It was my original design to follow the wonderful career of Buddha
until his long life closed with visions of the golden city much as
described in Revelation, and then to follow that most wonderful career
of Buddhist missions, not only through India and Ceylon, but to
Palestine, Greece and Egypt, and over the table-lands of Asia and
through the Chinese Empire to Japan, and thence by the black stream to
Mexico and Central America, and then to follow the wise men of the East
until the Light of the world dawned on them on the plains of
Bethlehem--a task but half accomplished, whic