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Updated: June 13, 2025
Even if evil be but the shadow of good, a M̬aya, an appearance, yet must we not act as if it had a real existence, and combat it with all our might? May we also venture to include Buddhism among the religions which may directly or indirectly have prepared the way for Bahaism? We may; the evidence is as follows.
All the world over there is this stirring in the dry bones of the old beliefs. There is scarcely a religion that has not its Bahaism, its Modernists, its Brahmo Somaj, its "religion without theology," its attempts to escape from old forms and hampering associations to that living and world-wide spiritual reality upon which the human mind almost instinctively insists. . . .
Those members of Christian communions which are attracted to Bahaism find in it a real hospitality to the inherited faith they take over. It is possible, therefore, to belong to the cult and at the same time to continue one's established religious life without any very great violence and indeed with a possible intensification of that life.
This may perhaps suffice for the parallels partly real, partly supposed between early Christianity and early Bahaism. I will now refer to an important parallel between the development of Christianity and that of Buddhism. It is possible to deny that the Christianity of Augustine [Footnote: Professor Anesaki of Tokio regards Augustine as the Christian Nagarjuna.] deserves its name, on the ground of the wide interval which exists between his religious doctrines and the beliefs of Jesus Christ. Similarly, one may venture to deny that the Mahâyâna developments of Buddhism are genuine products of the religion because they contain some elements derived from other Indian systems. In both cases, however, grave injustice would be done by any such assumption. It is idle 'to question the historical value of an organism which is now full of vitality and active in all its functions, and to treat it like an archaeological object, dug out from the depths of the earth, or like a piece of bric-
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