ted and
persecuted the Christians, especially the ascetics. After this king,
Abenner by name, had long been childless, a boy greatly desired and
matchless in beauty, was born to him and received the name of Josaphat. The
king, in his joy, summons astrologers to predict the child's destiny. They
foretell glory and prosperity beyond those of all his predecessors. One
sage, most learned of all, assents, but intimates that the scene of this
glory will be, not the paternal kingdom, but another infinitely more
exalted, and that the child will adopt the faith which his father
persecutes.

The boy shows a thoughtful and devout turn. King Abenner, troubled by this
and by the remembrance of the prediction, selects a secluded city, in which
he causes a splendid palace to be built, where his son should abide,
attended only by tutors and servants in the flower of youth and health. No
stranger was to have access, and the boy was to be cognizant of none of the
sorrows of humanity, such as poverty, disease, old age or death, but only
of what was pleasant, so that he should have no inducement to think of the
future life; nor was he ever to hear a word of Christ and His religion.

Prince Josaphat grows up in this seclusion, acquires all kinds of knowledge
and exhibits singular endowments. At length, on his urgent prayer, the king
reluctantly permits him to pass the limits of the palace, after having
taken all precautions to keep painful objects out of sight. But through
some neglect of orders, the prince one day encounters a leper and a blind
man, and asks of his attendants with pain and astonishment what such a
spectacle should mean. These, they tell him, are ills to which man is
liable. Shall all men have such ills? he asks. And in the end he returns
home in deep depression. Another day he falls in with a decrepit old man,
and stricken with dismay at the sight, renews his questions and hears for
the first time of death. And in how many years, continues the prince, does
this fate befall man? and must he expect death as inevitable? Is there _no_
way of escape? No means of eschewing this wretched state of decay? The
attendants reply as may be imagined; and Josaphat goes home more pensive
than ever, dwelling on the certainty of death and on what shall be
thereafter.

At this time Barlaam, an eremite of great sanctity and knowledge, dwelling
in the wilderness of Sennaritis, divinely warned, travels to India in the
disguise of a merchant,