172 REV. RICHARD COLLINS, M.A. 
imagination, to the divinity of Christ, as preached by the 
Christians. 
20. If, on the other hand, supposing it to be granted that 
the Bhagayvad-Gité was written previously to the commence- 
ment of the Christian era, we seek, as many have done, for 
doctrines there that may have been appropriated by the New 
Testament writers, waiving, of course, for the moment, all the 
evidence for the truth of their record, how much is it possible 
to find that could have been appropriated ? There are, indeed, 
ideas and expressions which have a resemblance to Christian 
ideas and expressions. ‘There is the idea of incarnation. But 
could the picture of the charioteer, with the universe in his 
stomach, have been the germ of such a picture of the incar- 
nate God as we have in the New Testament? We can only 
express astonishment that any sane mind could ever have 
given birth to such a suggestion. ‘The truth is, that there is 
only one point common to the two pictures, the person 
of Christ, and the person of Krishna, and that is the 
bare fact of the incarnation of the Deity. Then there are the 
doctrines of forgiveness, faith, love, and union through faith 
with the divine ; but these are set among speculations as to 
the soul and its environments, where they are plainly seen to 
be additions, unconformable to the other doctrines of the 
poem; they exist, like parasites on the forest treés, beautiful 
enough in themselves, but, having no roots in the common 
ground, they stand among the words of Krishna without 
reasons for their existence, or ends to be accomplished: while 
they are most utterly, as I have shown, incongruous with the 
character of Krishna, as set forth in other parts of Maha- 
bharata. 
The same doctrines in the New Testament are placed 
between antecedents and consequents, which both illus- 
trate and enforce them; they form perfect parts of a perfect 
whole, and are fully explained both as to their reasons and 
ends. Moreover, they breathe the very essence of Ilis 
character who enforced them. ‘To try to build up the edifice 
of Christian doctrine from the isolated likenesses to some of 
its teachings which we find in the Bhagavad-Giti, is lke 
trying to build a house of sand, though it be true that every 
grain of sand is a stone in miniature. 
21. With regard to the other accounts of Krishna in the 
Puranas, and elsewhere, they are so evidently subsequent, and 
some of them long subsequent, to the commencement of the 
Christian era, that the question of indebtedness, if there be 
any, solves itself. 
22. It will, of course, be asked—and this is a matter of great 
