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his object could possibly be gained. The pure morality of his 

 doctrines, and the general conformity of his precepts to those 

 contained in the Old Testament writings, have often been remarked 

 upon. He lived at a time when, for more than a hundred years, the 

 ten tribes of the kingdom of Israel had been scattered, and, as it 

 were, sifted over and among the nations of the earth ; when more- 

 over the inhabitants of Judea had been carried captive to Chaldea ; 

 and when princes and priests of the children of the captivity were 

 holding the reins of power in places of highest trust in the 

 Babylonish empire, — that empire which was then the mistress of 

 the world, and whose king, in the zenith of his greatness, chose 

 Daniel the Jewish prophet for his Vizier. What more likely then 

 than that Buddha may have become acquainted with the Book of 

 the Law, which the Israelites and Jews carried with them 

 wherever they went,* — the divinely inspired code of a people, the 

 fame of whose kings, David and Solomon, had rang through every 

 known land.f It was an age when the whole race of mankind was 

 agitated with the throes of a religious revolution — a mighty menta} 

 regeneration, which developed itself, in the Gentile world, by the 

 production of such master-minds as Gautama, Pythagoras, Con- 

 fucius, and Laotse. In the tenets taught by these men, and in 



* Just as nearly twelve hundred years later, the Arabian prophet Mohammed 

 became acquainted with, and obtained much, if not the whole, of the morality of 

 the Koran from the sacred writings of both Jews and Christians. 



f " The natural division of India is that into Hindustan and the Deccan, not 

 because the one is continental, and the other peninsular, nor because the one con- 

 sists / mainly of two extensive river valleys, and the other of an elevated table land, 

 but because they are separated by a barrier of mountain and forest, the Vindhya 

 range, which renders impossible any but a very slow infiltration of ideas and 

 peculiarities of race. At the time of which we speak [the fifth and sixth centuries 

 before the Christian era] such infiltration was already at work. Aryan merchants 

 visited the harbours of both coasts of the peninsula ; and as far back as the age of 

 Solomon [1000, b. c.],' brought the produce of Malabar, — conspicuous animals, 



