The existence of Buddhism in Alexandria has often been suspected. Scholars have seen Buddhists in the communities of the Essenes in Palestine, in the monastic j, congregations of the Therapeutae described by Philo, in the Hermetic books of Egypt, and especially in the kore kosmoy,

preserved for us by Stobaeus. The identity of these with Buddhism has never been clearly established. It has also been often suspected that Gnosticism was derived from Buddhism. Again, the identity has never been clearly established, possibly because Western scholars have devoted their attention almost exclusively to the Hinayana Buddhism of Ceylon and the Pali books. It would not readily occur to any one to look for traces of Egyptian Gnosticism in remote Japan. Yet there can be little doubt that the system known in Japan as the Shingon, and introduced into that country about A.D. 804, by the celebrated Kobo Daishi, must be looked upon as a system which is not Indian in its origin, but which has been foisted upon Buddhism from some extraneous quarter, and that it is essentially Egyptian and Gnostic.

The Gnosticism of Basilides was based on the religions which that thinker found to his hand in Alexandria, and the task to which he set himself was apparently to reconcile the fact of Christ with the preconceived notions of the Alexandrian people. The religions were mainly two, the ancient Egyptian cults, and Judaism. The mythologies of Greece and Rome did not apparently count for much in Alexandria, the philosophies in vogue were not those of the schools of Athens, nor were they such as Seneca or Pliny would have delighted in. The Judaism of Alexandria was of a far more liberal type (or shall we call it "broad"? to be "broad" is not always to be "liberal") than that of Jerusalem, and the "broad" school of Jewish thought which eventuated in the Cabbalah looked to Alexandria as its nursery. Egypt lay outside of St. Paul's province--on no other hypothesis can we explain his neglect of a city of such importance to an Apostle to the Gentiles--and all early notices of Alexandrian Christianity show it to have been for many years of a

very vague and mixed character. Evidently the spiritual soil of Alexandria was different from that of Jerusalem, Ephesus, or Rome, and required a different treatment.

Basilides is spoken of by Clement of Alexandria, who had better opportunities of judging than Irenaeus, as a worthy man and an earnest Christian, and his efforts to adapt the fact of Christ to the spiritual prejudices of the Egyptian or Egyptianized Alexandrians were probably quite praiseworthy. A missionary religion must adapt itself to the circumstances and thought of the people to whom it comes.