Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/16

4 as mourning, that by the weight of human iniquities accumulated upon her she is pressed down into Patala, the hell of the Hindoos. The gods themselves complain of the oppression of the giants; and Vishnu consoles the earth as well as the gods by assuring them that a Saviour will come to redress their wrongs, and put an end to the tyranny of the demons (Dartyas); that for this end he will become incarnate in the house of a shepherd, and be brought up amidst pastoral people. Confucius, in his writings, laments the loss of the Sacred Tripod, by which he probably meant the idea of the Tri-une God; and he announces to the Hundred Families*, that the Saint, par excellence, is to be born in the West.

By degrees, as the time approached, the Poets, those half divine seers {mens divinior) who draw their inspirations from the traditions of all nations, began to sing the birth of the Saviour of men; and to send from one end of the world to the other prophetic echoes of the marvellous event expected. In the Indian poem called Barta-Sastra f, after a long detail of the woes and disorders of the Age of Iron (Kaly-Younga), a Hindoo sage, addressing himself to Darma Raja, one of the greatest kings of India, expresses himself as follows:—"Then shall be born a Brahmin, in the city of Sambhala. This shall be the Vishnu Yesu; he shall possess the Divine Scriptures and all the sciences, without having employed to learn them as much time as it takes to pronounce a single word. That is why he shall be called the Sarva Buddha —he who knows in

An expression designating the Chinese nation,

Barta-Sastra in the 3rd vol., entitled Arania-parva, or narrative of the Adventures of the Forest.