the older accounts of Catholic missionaries to Thibet, in Pinkerton's Collec- tion of Voyages and Travels, voL vii., and also the recent work of Hue, a French missionary priest of the congregation of St. Lazare : Souvenirs d'un Voyage dans la Tartaric, le Thibet, ct la Chine, pendant les annees 1844-1816. Comp. also on the _^^ whole subject the two works of E. S. Hardy-. "Eastern Monachism," and "A Manual of Buddhism in its modern development, translated from Singalese ilSS." Lond. 185Q* The striking afBnity between Buddhism and Romanism extends, by the way, beyond monkery and convent life to the heirarchical organization, with the Grand Lama for pope, and to the worship, with its ceremonies, feasts, processions, pilgrimages, confessional, a kind of mass, prayers for the dead, extreme imction, &c. The view is certainly at least plausible, to which the great geographer Carl Ritt^r (Erdkunde, ii. p. 283-299, 2d ed.) has given the weight of his name, that the 152 THIRD PEEIOD. A.D. 311-590. and the ascetic system was completed in India long before the introduction of Christianity, even if we should trace this back y to St. Bartholomew and St. Thomas.. t ^ jL^'^t. The Hellenic heathenism was less serious and contempla- S^ r^ tive, indeed, than the Oriental ; yet the Pythagoreans were a gy li-' ' kind of monastic society, and the Platonic view of matter and of body not only lies at the bottom of the Gnostic and Mani- chgean asceticism, but had much to do also with the ethics of Origen and the Alexandrian school. Judaism, apart from the ancient INazarites,' had its Essenes in Palestine " and its Therapeutse in Egypt ; ' though these / betray the intrusion of foreign elements into the Mosaic reli- gion, and so find no mention in the J^ew Testament. Lastly, Mohammedanism, though in mere imitation of Christian and pagan examples, has, as is well known, its dervises and its cloisters.^ !Now were these earlier phenomena the source, or only analogies, of the Christian monasticism ? Tliat a multitude of foreign usages and I'ites made their way into the church in the age of Constantino, is undeniable. Hence many have held, that monasticism also came from heathenism, and was an apostasy from apostolic Christianity, which Paul had plainly foretold in the Pastoral Epistles.^ But such a view can hardly be Lamaists in Thibet borrowed their religious forms and ceremonies in part from the Nestorian missionaries. But this view is a mere hypothesis, and is rendered im- probable by the fact, that Buddhism in Cochin China, Tonquin, and Japan, where no Nestorian missionaries ever were, shows the same striking resemblance to Romanism as the Lamaism of Thibet, Tartary, and North China. Respecting the singular tra- dition of Prester John, or the Christian priest-king in Eastern Asia, which arose about the eleventh century, and respecting the Nestorian missions, see Ritter, 1. c. * Comp. Num. vi. 1-21. ^ Comp. the remarkable description of these Jewish monks by the elder Pliny,