And Christ recognized the significance of their appeal. There was nothing yet to differentiate Him front him whom the East worshipped as the "Lord of this Saba-world," but He knew the lurking potentiality. His death, His uplifting, would give Him the magnetic power He needed. He would then begin to draw all men to Himself.

Two further points of contact between the infant Church of Christ and the East will be found in the Acts of the Apostles.

Men from many lands heard St. Peter's first Christian sermon on the Day of Pentecost. If the Acts are a genuine record of facts, Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, as well as Jews of Libya and Cyrene, and proselytes from Rome, listened to that great announcement of the gospel of Christ. It is hard to believe that the men who heard and believed, and were pricked to the heart by what they

heard, should not have told their fellow-townsmen of the great events that they had witnessed at Jerusalem. There is also something peculiarly significant in the selection of Antioch as the headquarters of Gentile Christianity. No town, not even Alexandria, was more advantageously situated in this respect than Antioch. I shall reserve to the next chapter what I have to say about these two great cities.

I find one more point of contact with the Far East in the Book of the Revelation, in the vision of the man with the bow, who rides on a white horse and goes forth conquering and to conquer. Again I must content myself here with a bare mention of the fact. It will require a chapter to itself if the point is to be so put as to carry conviction to the mind of the reader, to whom it may possibly come with a shock of surprised horror.

Footnotes

^52:1 Cf. Eusebius, "Eccl. Hist.," V.

^52:2 By Dr. Muller in the Transactions of the Berlin Museum fur Volkerkunde.

^52:3 Amongst the Sutras translated into Chinese by the batch of Buddhist missionaries who arrived at Loyang in A.D. 147 is one on Astrology, of which an English translation was given in the Contemporary Review for February, 1876 (vol. xxvii. pp. 417-424), by the late Prof. Childers. It is directed against the practice of astrology as a useless and misleading superstition, and shows how foolish it is to suppose that the stars can possibly have any influence on the welfare or happiness of man. This would seem to show that the particular form of Buddhism preached by these men (which seems to have been a kind of undeveloped Amidaism) was strenuously opposed to fortune telling and astrology. Nevertheless, it will be seen, there were some sects of Buddhism which allowed their followers to have recourse to the soothsayer. There are such in Japan to-day. But see what I have to say in my chapter on the Han translators.

^53:1 "Bukkyo Mondo Shu," p. 33 ff.