The testimony of S'akyamuni must always be a very weighty matter, for the Indian Sage was not one that spoke lightly and rashly, but always with due deliberation and with tremendous authority.

[paragraph continues] But no other evidence than S'akyamuni's authority is alleged for the Hozo story, and Buddhists are not all of one mind as to the genuineness of the Sutras in. which it is contained. The Southern Buddhists know nothing of the books, and there is not a shred of outside historical evidence to support the story they tell. There is, also, no gainsaying the fact that the Shinshu themselves are obliged to confess that the doctrine lay dormant for five centuries after S'akyamuni's death and never showed its face until about the end of the first, or beginning of the second, century of the Christian era, and that in regions where Christianity had already then been preached. On the other hand, however, those who reject these Scriptures, as not being genuine, bring forward no alternative supposition or theory to account for these books having come into existence. We are, therefore, constrained to admit that the only account hitherto given of the origin of these Sutras is that they are the genuine records of actual teachings of S'akyamuni. Those who reject this view have advanced no other theory to take its place.

I therefore, for the time, and until I see proof to the contrary, accept them as genuine records of S'akyamuni's teachings. The story of Hozo Biku is true, at any rate in the sense that it is in accordance with a universally felt want of our human nature, to which it supplies an answer. It states an everlasting fact,--"so it is written, so it must needs be,"--that there is only one way in which the Redemption of Mankind can take place. God must become man, must suffer and labour as man, must conquer sin and death in man, must open the

way for man by faith. S'akyamuni, who had come forth, says Shinran, that he might preach Amida, did so with the eye of the genuine Seer, who gazes on the Eternal Verities and beholds the Present and the Future as though they were the Past,--and as he preached he framed his vision into a prophecy. To my mind there is nowhere, in the whole range of ancient religious literature, a more clear and distinct prophecy about the Person and Work of Christ, than that which is contained in the story of Hozo Biku as I have tried to set it forth accurately and carefully from Shinshu writings.