REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSION. 405 



has signally and totally failed to give an answer to 

 any of these questions. 



Hellenists had engaged themselves to exhibit the 

 whole of Christianity in the philosophy of Greece 

 and Rome, and to pick out for us in the "Thoughts" 

 of Marcus Aurelius, and the "Manual" of Epictetus, 

 all the " scattered members " of the Sermon on the 

 Mount. But they did not succeed in this, and still 

 less did they succeed in explaining why the Sermon 

 on the Mount has conquered the world, and why the 

 "Manual," and the "Thoughts "of Epictetus and 

 Marcus Aurelius have always remained completely 

 sterile. 



Hebraists undertook to dissipate the " irrational " 

 and "the marvelous," in the Bible; to exhibit it as a 

 book like the " Iliad " or the " Mahabahrata," but the 

 sum total of their researches has issued in the very 

 opposite of what they anticipated, and their labors 

 have had the effect of reintegrating what they had 

 hoped to destroy. 



Orientalists, in their turn, promised to deduce 

 Christianity from Buddhism, and to prove that the 

 teachings of Christ were drawn wholly, or in great 

 part, from the doctrines of Buddha. Like the Hel- 

 lenists and Hebraists, however, these orientalists failed 

 completely to establish their thesis, and, far from 

 throwing light on the subjects which they set out to 

 clear up, they but plunged them into greater obscur- 

 ity and introduced new hypotheses instead of reach- 

 ing positive and incontestable conclusions. 



All along the line, the science of which we 

 are speaking the phyiscal, natural, historical, and 



