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Il8 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES ulation forty or fifty times greater than Palestine; and the same disparity in numbers continued after Jesus was born, and so continues to this day. Before Jesus' birth, Buddhism had crossed the Himalayas and was welcomed in Tibet (7) ; and the swarming multitudes of China had approved it. Dago- bas (churches) had been erected from the Punjab to the mouth of the Ganges ; Assam and Burmah had felt its influence and surrendered to its mild sway; it had penetrated the Indian Ocean and hoisted its victorious banner triumphantly over Ceylon. In fact, all that vast and populous region from the Yellow Sea to Persia was, two hundred years B. C, under the religious sway of Buddhism. It is true that the old Brahmans still offered serious opposition ; but it was ineffectual to check the rising flood. Moreover, a great event which took place about three hundred and thirty years B. C. had opened the gates for its migra- tion further west. Alexander, that great Macedonian butcher, on his march to conquer Persia, founded a city named for himself on the southern shores of the Mediterranean ; and those old lines of intercourse with India, by sea, were called into requisition more frequently than ever before. Towards this new city of Alexandria people of all classes, from every known quarter of the globe, flocked (7) Tibet held firmly to Buddha's religion for five centuries, when Lamaism (Trhicb is partly religious and partly political) crept in (Br. Ency., vol, 14, p. 226). A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 119 in great numbers, and they were welcomed without regard to their nationahty or their reHgion. Greeks came with their gods and their philosophy; Egyptians with their worship of animals and their pe- culiar ritual for the dead; Persians with their Zend Avesta (their bible), which taught that hell was a cold, frozen place, where the wicked suffered for a time; and the Jew with his Thora (law), which left out both heaven and hell, but allowed slavery and permitted polygamy. (8) He here offered his bloody sacrifices without hindrance or objection. All these came early and were simply magnets which drew others to them. Two hundred years B. C. this new city had so grown and flourished that it was the commercial metropolis of the world. Does anyone suppose that this could happen and India remain unmoved amid all this trade and tumult ? If so, let us see what Alexander himself did to open new lines of intercourse with India. After conquering Persia he entered the Punjab, the land of the seven rivers ; crossed the great Indus, and at the river Jhelum defeated Porus, an Indian King, but lost his famous war horse, Bucephalus. From here Alexander sent Nearchus, one of his ad- mirals, down the Indus, with orders to examine the route for trafific along the Indian Ocean to the mouth of the Euphrates, and later went himself down that great river, where, near its mouth, he planned a new (8) Exodus 21:2; Leviticus, ch. 25, v. 39 to 44. The Jews would even buy their own brothers, Levit. 25, v. 89. 120 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES Alexandria, to trade with the one at the mouth of the Nile. He had encountered Buddhism in Bactra and Kabul, but in northwest India its Samanas (priests) and its Dagobas (temples or churches) were found in sur- prising numbers. It is said that his of^cers, and even the private soldiers of his army, were greatly interested in Buddha's religion. From the mouth of the Indus Alexander turned toward Bactra, and a year or two later died, as we know, in a drunken debauch at Baby- lon. But he had opened up a new line of communica- tion with India, which from that day to this has never been closed. After Alexander's death Bactra and India fell to the portion of Seleucus Nicator, one of Alexander's gen- erals. But meanwhile Chandra-Gupta, a Buddhist ad- venturer, had formed a principality in the Ganges val- ley in the present territory of Oudh, and so stoutly op- posed Nicator's pretensions that war followed. (9) Section 3. Nicator found his way to the Syrian throne beset with such serious difficulties that he ofifered Chandra-Gupta peace, and all northwest India, including the Greek settlements founded by Alexander, on condition that he would send him five hundred ele- phants. Chandra agreed to accept this if Nicator would give him his daughter in marriage. The bargain was struck, (9) Chandra Gupta was the Grandfather of Asoka, the King. The Greeks called him Sandrocottus. I will add that the land of Ophir was no doubt in India. There was also a great over- land route from India west by way of Palmyra and Mesopotamia. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 121 and thus a Greek princess became a Hindu's wife, and all of Alexander's Greek colonists became Indian subjects. Nicator moreover sent to this Ganges court Megasthenes, that clear headed ambassador, who, in writing his impressions of India gave to the world a most interesting piece of history. "The people," he said, "are brave, truthful, industrious, sober, not quar- relsome, and so honest that they require no locks on their doors." But that which first struck his attention and called forth his admiration was that in India men and women could not be bought and sold. Buddha's teachings had set the last captive free. "Slavery," said Megas- thenes, "does not exist there." This was three hun- dred years before Jesus came. At that time all the known world, India alone ex- cepted, was engaged in the nefarious traffic of buying and selling human beings. Nations then unborn af- terwards engaged in it, and it is only ninety-eight years ago that England abolished it. America, my own loved country, extinguished it barely forty-five years ago ; and then only after a long and bloody war. But India herself, before this, and under Brahmanic rule, had been severe. When Buddha came he found seven classes of slaves (10), and the poor Sudras were so ground down that they were not allowed to learn even a text or a line of the Veda. (10) Captives in war; he who serves for his daily food; born slaves, purchased slaves, inherited slave" those given, and thoie enslaved for punishment. 122 A QUESTION OF MIRACLllS Buddha tauglit tliat a man docs not become low caste by birth; nor by birth does one become high caste. "High caste," he said, "is the result of high actions. By actions man may degrade himself to a caste that is low." The first move that Buddha made against slav- ery was to take the degraded Sudra into his Samgha (church). And here I must observe that Buddha's religion, like that of Jesus, found its first adherents among the poor and the lowly. The rich Pharisees in Jerusalem scorned the teachings of Jesus; so also the lordly Brahman of India confronted Buddha at every turn. Section 4. Let us now pass on to a little later period. About 224 years B. C, Asoka, a zealous Buddhist, the grandson of Chandra-Gupta, came to the throne of Gupta's kingdom. (11) Asoka was as intensely zealous for Buddhism as was St. Paul afterwards for Christianity. But Asoka had one great advantage over Paul — he was a king, and he wielded his kingly scepter in behalf of his religion with such amazing effect that to this day some of his edicts are found deeply and plainly graven upon rocks and pillars, stretching over a territory from Afghanistan on the west to the great Brahmaputra on the east, a dis- tance of more than two thousand miles. Whatever Asoka did, he did systematically. First he called a grand council, and settled the cardinal doctrines of the Buddhist faith. Next, he published (11) I shall not stop now to mention the diflferent councils of Buddhists, but take that up in a subsequent chapter. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 123 his edicts, warmly commending the faith to his sub- jects and commanding their obedience thereto. He sent priests and missionaries in every direction to spread it. He founded great numbers of monasteries ; and it is said he supported from his royal revenues more than sixty thousand priests. He set up memorial columns in every province, and in short made it an active, flourishing state religion. That the purity of its doctrines might not become corrupted, he estab- lished a department, and appointed a minister of jus- tice and religion, to look after the morals of his people. Asoka's religion consisted in v^'orks, as well as faith; he caused wells to be dug for the poor; he beautified their grounds and the highways, by planting trees and shrubbery.