188 REV. RICHARD COLLINS, M.A. 
the date of the poem. If, as I suppose, the reference be to the 
Buddhist, when the antagonism, which ultimately led to the 
expulsion of Buddhism from the continent, was probably at its 
height, this passage must be referred to a time some centuries 
below the commencement of the Christian era ; while if, according 
to the other supposition, the dreaded enemy were the Saivite, the 
origin of the passage might be even more modern. 
With respect to another subject, frequently expressed, that the 
doctrine of the Gita is only a natural development of germs of 
religious thought already exhibited in earlier Hindu writings, 
especially in the Upanishads, which are generally regarded as the 
latest of the strictly Vedic writings, it seems to me to be a theory 
which cannot be substantiated. J cannot find in the Upanishads 
any adumbration of the special character of the Gita. The° 
Upanishads may be broadly said to be meditations—and often 
most charmingly illustrated meditations—on the Universal Spirit, 
as manifested throughout nature, and especially in the persons of 
gods and men; and the nearest approach that I remember to have 
remarked to the teaching of Krishna is the saying of Indra to one 
who had reached his heaven, “Know me only ; that is what I 
deem most beneficial to man, that he should. know me” (Kaushitahi- 
Up., chap. iii.). But I cannot persuade myself that this is a germ 
pregnant with the “mysteries” of the “divine song” ; nor can it 
lead up to the doctrine of the manifestation of the divine in the 
human, which is the specific doctrine of the poem. 
The real character of Vaishnavism, as distinguished from 
earlier Hindu religious thought, needs to be carefully studied. The 
new phase in Vaishnavism is the worship of a personal God, 
originating from the incarnation of Vishnu in the person of 
Krishna ; and this is at the real root of Vaishnavism, and plainly 
discernible in its branches, through its many subsequent entangle- 
ments. The thesis of Vaishnavism, and some of the most 
prominent parts of its construction, are so manifestly of the same 
nature as the thesis of Christianity, and some of its most 
prominent features, that it is difficult indeed to believe that they 
have arisen without any connexion whatever between them. And 
to suppose—a supposition that we know to have been made—that 
Christianity itself has borrowed some of the gems of Vaishnayism, 
and has rescued them from a setting of fable and immorality, to 
give them a fresh setting in the midst of the divine light of purity ; 
nay, to claim—and the claim has been made—that they are them- 
selves the very germs and parents of that divine light in the midst 
of which they glow in the Christian Scriptures, is to make a 
