my own conceptions and even fancies in many things, I believe the leading characters and incidents to be historical, and I have given nothing as the teaching of the great master which was not to my mind clearly authenticated.

To those who have read so much about agnostic Buddhism, and about Nirvana meaning annihilation, it may seem bold in me to present Buddha as an undoubting believer in the fundamental truths of all religion, and as not only a believer in a spiritual world but an actual visitor to its sad and blissful scenes; but the only agnosticism I have been able to trace to Buddha was a want of faith in the many ways invented through the ages to escape the consequences of sin and to avoid the necessity of personal purification, and the only annihilation he taught and yearned for was the annihilation of self in the highest Christian sense, and escape from that body of death from which the Apostle Paul so earnestly sought deliverance.

Doubtless agnosticism and almost every form of belief and unbelief subsequently sprang up among the intensely acute and speculative peoples of the East known under the general name of Buddhists, as they did among the less acute and speculative peoples of the West known as Christians; but the one is no more primitive Buddhism than the other is primitive Christianity.

While there are innumerable poetic legends—of which Spence Hardy's "Manual of Buddhism" is a great storehouse, and many of which are given by Arnold in his beautiful poem—strewn thick along the track of Buddhist literature, constantly tempting one to leave the straight path of the development of a great religion, I have carefully avoided what did not commend itself to my mind as either historical or spiritual truth.

It was my original design to follow the wonderful career of Buddha until his long life closed with visions of the golden city much as described in Revelation, and then to follow that most wonderful career of Buddhist missions, not only through India and Ceylon, but to Palestine, Greece and Egypt, and over the table-lands of Asia and through the Chinese Empire to Japan, and thence by the black stream to Mexico and Central America, and then to follow the wise men of the East until the Light of the world dawned on them on the plains of Bethlehem—a task but half accomplished, which I shall yet complete if life and strength are spared.

A valued literary friend suggests that the social life described in the following pages is too much like ours, but why should their daily life and social customs be greatly different from ours? The Aryan migrations to India and to Europe were in large masses, of course taking their social customs, or as the Romans would say, their household gods, with them.

What wonder, then, that the home as Tacitus describes it in the "Wilds of Germany" was substantially what Mueller finds from the very structure of the Sanscrit and European languages it must have been in Bactria, the common cradle of the Aryan race. There can scarcely be a doubt that twenty-five hundred years ago the daily life and social customs in the north of India, which had been under undisputed Aryan control long enough for the Sanscrit language to spring up, come to perfection and finally become obsolete, were more like ours than like those of modern India after the, many—and especially the Mohammedan—conquests and after centuries of oppression and alien rule.

If a thousand English-speaking Aryans should now be placed on some distant island, how much would their social customs and even amusements differ from ours in a hundred years? Only so far as changed climate and surrounding's compelled.

I give as an introduction an outline of the golden, silver, brazen and iron ages, as described by the ancient poets and believed in by all antiquity, as it was in the very depths of the darkness of the iron age that our great light appeared in Northern India. The very denseness of the darkness of the age in which he came makes the clearness of the light more wonderful, and accounts for the joy with which it was received and the rapidity with which it spread.

Not to enter into the niceties of chronological questions, the mission of Buddha may be roughly said to have commenced about five hundred years before the commencement of our era, and with incessant labors and long and repeated journeys to have lasted forty-five years, when at about the age of eighty he died, or, as the Buddhists more truthfully and more beautifully say, entered Nirvana.

  HENRY T. NILES.
  TOLEDO, January 1, 1894.

* * * * *

Since this work was in the hands of the printer I have read the recent work of Bishop Copelston, of Columbo, Ceylon, and it was a source of no small gratification to find him in all material points agreeing with the result of my somewhat extensive investigations as given within, for in Ceylon, if anywhere, we would expect accuracy. Here the great Buddhist development first comes in contact with authentic history during the third century B.C. in the reign of the great Asoka, the discovery of whose rock inscriptions shed such a flood of light on primitive Buddhism, while it still retained enough of its primitive power, as we learn from those inscriptions themselves, to turn that monarch from a course of cruel tyranny, and, as we learn from the history of Ceylon, to induce his son and daughter to abandon royalty and become the first missionaries to that beautiful island.

H.T.N.

INTRODUCTION.

  The golden age—when men were brothers all,
  The golden rule their law and God their king;
  When no fierce beasts did through the forests roam,
  Nor poisonous reptiles crawl upon the ground;
  When trees bore only wholesome, luscious fruits,
  And thornless roses breathed their sweet perfumes;
  When sickness, sin and sorrow were unknown,
  And tears but spoke of joy too deep for words;
  When painless death but led to higher life,
  A life that knows no end, in that bright world
  Whence angels on the ladder Jacob saw,
  Descending, talk with man as friend to friend—
  That age of purity and peace had passed,
  But left a living memory behind,
  Cherished and handed down from sire to son
  Through all the scattered peoples of the earth,
  A living prophecy of what this world,
  This sad and sinful world, might yet become.

  The silver age—an age of faith, not sight—
  Came next, when reason ruled instead of love;
  When men as through a glass but darkly saw
  What to their fathers clearly stood revealed
  In God's own light of love-illumined truth,
  Of which the sun that rising paints the east,
  And whose last rays with glory gild the west,
  Is but an outbirth. Then were temples reared,
  And priests 'mid clouds of incense sang His praise
  Who out of densest darkness called the light,
  And from His own unbounded fullness made
  The heavens and earth and all that in them is.
  Then landmarks were first set, lest men contend
  For God's free gifts, that all in peace had shared.
  Then laws were made to govern those whose sires
  Were laws unto themselves. Then sickness came,
  And grief and pain attended men from birth to death.
  But still a silver light lined every cloud,
  And hope was given to cheer and comfort men.

  The brazen age, brilliant but cold, succeeds.
  This was an age of knowledge, art and war,
  When the knights-errant of the ancient world,
  Adventures seeking, roamed with brazen swords