Precisely similar was the system pursued by the missionaries in India.
“The island of Salsette,” says Captain Head, “abounds in mythological antiquities and pagan temples—two gigantic figures of Buddha, near twenty feet high, of complete preservation, which they owe to the zeal of the Portuguese, who painted them red, and converted the place they ornamented to a Catholic chapel.”
The Pantheon at Rome was new modelled in the same manner. In a word, as Grotius has before affirmed, “infinite appropriations have been made.”
But, independently of this conversion, the conformity itself between the Christian and the Budhist religion was so great that the Christians, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope with Vasco de Gama, performed their devotions in an Indian temple, on the shores of Hindustan! Nay, “in many parts of the peninsula,” say the Asiatic Researches, “Christians are called, and considered as followers of Buddha, and their divine legislator, whom they confound with the apostle of India, is declared to be a form of Buddha, both by the followers of Brahma and those of Siva; and the information I had received on that subject is confirmed by F. Paulino.”
It was not so with those who made religion a trade, and only the auxiliary password to their selfish aggrandisement! When the “abomination of desolation”[419] swept over this country, and strewed the verdure of its surface with the indiscriminate fragments of cathedrals, of castles, and of towers, the crosses but as little escaped the scourge!
Having had occasion to pass through Finglas, on their march to the siege of Drogheda, and fancying the cross which stood there to have been necessarily the erection of obnoxious Romanism, they gave it an iconoclast blow, which broke its shaft into two! Thus decapitated, it fell. But the citizens, wishing to avoid further profanation, soon as ever the army evacuated the town, took the disjointed relic and buried it very decorously within the confines of the churchyard!
Here it remained, in consecrated interment, until the beginning of the year 1816, when an old man of the parish, recounting anecdotes of bygone times, mentioned amongst others, the particulars of this tradition, and excited some curiosity by the narrative.
The Rev. Robert Walsh was then curate of Finglas, and this mysterious history having reached his ears, he determined forthwith to ascertain its evidences. His first step was to see the chronicler himself.—This personage’s name was Jack White. Jack, who was himself well stricken in years, told him that he had learned, a long while ago, from his father, who was then himself rather elderly, that he had been shown by his still older grandfather the identical spot where the cross had been concealed, and could point it out now to anyone with certainty and preciseness.
The proposal was accepted; workmen were employed; and, after considerable perseverance, the cross was exhumed, its parts reunited by iron cramps, and re-erected, as opposite, within a short distance of the scene of its subterranean slumbers, as if in renascent triumph over the destroyer!