that he is able to work a miracle (Jo. ii. 1-12). Jesus, after visiting Capernaum, proceeded for the passover to Jerusalem, where it is said that many believed in him because of his miracles. His expulsion of the money-changers, however, brought him into collision with the authorities of his nation, who asked him for a sign; a question to which he replied by the undertaking to rebuild the temple, if destroyed, in three days (Jo. ii. 13-25). But one of the Jewish rulers, named Nicodemus, was disposed to believe in his pretensions. This man came to him by night, and heard from him a long theological disquisition (Jo. iii. 1-21). Jesus then went into Judea, and remained there with his disciples baptizing his converts. John the Baptist is made to bear an emphatic testimony to his superiority (Jo. iii. 22-36). A visit to Samaria is the occasion for an interesting dialogue with a Samaritan woman who had come to draw water at a well; and her report leads the inhabitants to come out and see the prophet by whom she had been so much impressed.
This incident is reproduced with curious fidelity in Buddhist story. Ananda, one of Sakyamuni's disciples, met with a Matangi woman, one of a degraded caste, who was drawing water, and asked her to give him some of it to drink. Just as the Samaritan wondered that Jesus, a Jew, should ask drink of her, one of a nation with whom the Jews had no dealings, so this young Matangi girl warned Ananda of her caste, which rendered it unlawful for her to approach a monk. And as Jesus nevertheless continued to converse with the woman, so Ananda did not shrink from this outcast damsel. "I do not ask thee, my sister," he replied, "either thy caste or thy family; I only ask thee for water, if thou canst give me some." The Buddha himself, to whom the Matangi girl afterwards presented herself, treated her with equal kindness. He contrived to divert the profane love she had conceived for Ananda into a holy love of religion; much as Jesus led the Samaritan from the thought of her five husbands, and of him who was not her husband, to the conception of the universal Father who was to be worshiped "in spirit and in truth." And as the disciples "marveled" that Jesus should have conversed with this member of a despised race, so the respectable Brahmins and householders who adhered to Buddhism were scandalized to learn that the young
