heism of the Jews, and made their
God a Trinity. The Buddhists and the Egyptians had Holy Trinities long
before. But whereas the Christian Trinity is unreasonable, the older
idea of the Trinity was based upon a perfectly lucid and natural
conception.

Christ is supposed by many to have first laid down the Golden Rule, "Do
unto others as you would that they should do unto you." But the Golden
Rule was laid down centuries before the Christian era.

Two of the most important of the utterances attributed to Christ are
the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. But there is very strong
evidence that the Lord's Prayer was used before Christ's time, and still
stronger evidence that the Sermon on the Mount was a compilation, and
was never uttered by Christ or any other preacher in the form in which
it is given by St. Matthew.

Christ is said to have been tempted of the Devil. But apart from
the utter absurdity of the Devil's tempting God by offering Him the
sovereignty of the earth--when God had already the sovereignty of twenty
millions of suns--it is related of Buddha that he also was tempted of
the Devil centuries before Christ was born.

The idea that one man should die as a sacrifice to the gods on behalf
of many, the idea that the god should be slain for the good of men,
the idea that the blood of the human or animal "scapegoat" had power to
purify or to save, the idea that a king or a king's son should expiate
the sins of a tribe by his death, and the idea that a god should offer
himself as a sacrifice to himself in atonement for the sins of his
people--all these were old ideas, and ideas well known to the founders
of Christianity.

The resemblances of the legendary lives of Christ and Buddha are
surprising: so also are the resemblances of forms and ethics of the
ancient Buddhists and the early Christians.

Mr. Arthur Lillie, in _Buddha and Buddhism_, makes the following
quotation from M. Leon de Rosny:

The astonishing points of contact between the popular legend
of Buddha and that of Christ, the almost absolute similarity
of the moral lessons given to the world between these two
peerless teachers of the human race, the striking affinities
between the customs of the Buddhists and the Essenes, of whom
Christ must have been a disciple, suggest at once an Indian
origin to Primitive Christianity.

Mr. Lillie goes on to say that there was a sect of Essenes in Palestine
fifty