8. The shattered condition of their own religion, with all its conventional creeds, customs, and ceremonies, now suspended and literally prostrated, as above shown, vastly augmented the temptation ever rife with them to make another change in their religion, and subject their creed to another installment of new doctrines, by which it became Christianity.
9. The liberal character and tolerant spirit of the political and religious institutions of the kingdom of Alexandria, with its vast and attractive library of two hundred thousand volumes, established principally by Ptolemy Phila-delphus, with other attractive features already pointed out, furnished great facilities, as well as increased temptations to religious propagandists to absorb new theories, and make new creeds out of the vast medley of religious doctrines and speculative dogmas preached and propagated in that royal city by the disciples and representatives of nearly every religious system then in existence, brought together by the attractions above specified.
10. Hence every consideration would lead us to conclude, taken in connection with the facts above stated, and the well-known borrowing proclivity and imitative propensity of the Jews, that they would not, and could not, withstand the overweening and overpowering temptation to make another radical change in their religion by a new draught on the boundless reservoir of speculative ideas, religious tenets, and specious theories then glowing in the popular schools of Alexandria.
11. All the facts above enumerated would impel us to the conclusion that the Jews would—and every page of history touching the matter proves they did—make important changes in their religion by this contact with the oriental systems, as they had repeatedly done before. Some of this proof we will here present, to show how they originated Christianity.
12. "The schools of Alexandria" says Mr. Enfield, a Christian writer, "by pretending to teach sublime doctrines concerning God and divine things, enticed men of different countries and religions, and among the rest the Jews, to study its mysteries, and incorporate them with their own.... The Jewish faith mixed with the Pythagorean, and afterward with the Egyptian oriental theology" (that is, they became Essenes in the Grecian school of Pythagoras, who taught the doctrines of that religious order, then Bud-hists in the Egyptian schools of Alexandria). And finally, with Christ as their leader, who taught the doctrines of both schools (they being essentially alike), they assumed the name of Christian in honor of him, and thus is Christianity from Essene Budhism.
13. Beers in his "History of the Jews," sustains the above statement by the declaration that the Essenian Jews "fled to Egypt at the time of the Babylonian captivity, and there became acquainted with the Pythagorean philosophy, and ingrafted it upon the religion of Moses," which would make them Essenian Budhists—for Cunningham assures us that "the doctrine of Pythagoras were intensely Budhistic." (Philsa. Topus, chap. x.)
14. We will condense a few more historical testimonies relative to the entire change of the Jewish faith, while in Alexandria, as well as on other occasions, to show how easy and natural it was for that portion of the Jews who afterward became the founders of Christianity to slide into and adopt Essenian Budhism, whose doctrines they took to constitute the Christian religion.
15. Mr. Gibbon (chap. xxi.) declares that the theological opinions of the Jews underwent great changes by their contact with the various foreigners they found in Alexandria. Mr. Tytler likewise, in his "Universal History," assures us that the Jewish religion "became totally changed by the intermixture of heathen doctrines." Dr. Campbell also testifies that "their views came pretty much to coincide with those of the pagans." (See his Dissertation, vi.) And the author of "The Expositor for 1854" complains that the pagan "theology stole upon them from every quarter, and mingled in all the views of the then known tribes, so that by the year 150 b. c., it had wrought visible changes in their notions and habits of thought." (P. 423.) Here we have the proof that the whole Jewish religion underwent a change in Alexandria.
16. Now, most, certainly a nation or sect professing a religion so easily changed, and possessing a character so fickle, or so irrepressible as to yield on every slight occasion, and embrace every opportunity to imbibe new religious ideas and doctrines, would easily, if not naturally, slide into the adoption of the religious system then promulgated in Alexandria under the name of Budhism, and afterward remodeled or transformed, and called Christianity.
17. The Jews of the Essenian order, as we have in part shown in a previous chapter, set forth in their creed all the leading doctrines now comprised in the Christian religion hundreds of years before the advent of Christ, not excepting the doctrine of the divine incarnation and its adjuncts, as these concomitants of the present popular faith, we will now prove, were not unknown to the Jewish theology, but constituted a part of the religion of some of the principal Jewish sects. That standard Christian author, Mr. Milman, in his "History of Christianity," tells us that "the doctrine of the incarnation ('God manifest in the flesh') was the doctrine from the Ganges, and even the shores of the Yellow Sea to the Ilissus. It was the fundamental principle of the Indian Budhist religion and philosophy. It was the basis of Zoroasterism. It was pure Platonism. It was Platonic Judaism in the Alexandrian school." Here it is positively declared, by a popular Christian writer, whose work is a part of nearly every popular library in Christiandom as a standard authority, that the appearance of God amongst men in the human form, by human birth, was a doctrine of the Jewish religion in some of its branches, especially the Essenian branch—further proof that Christianity originated nothing, and gave utterance to no new doctrine or precepts, and performed no new miracles. Where, then, is the claim for its originality? On what ground is it predicated? Please answer us, good Christian brother.