IDEALS AS IDEALS Rabbi Hillel, while the ancient sect of the Nazarenes might have contributed the name and the person, with its beautiful sayings, reverberating out of some unknown antiquity. But while his vision thus exercised an undeniable influence over his own mind, he would have thought it insanity to offer it as evidence to any other. The function of such an experience, if admitted at all, was to his thinking, subjective alone. He might be led by it to doubt the historic character of Jesus of Nazareth; but he never referred to Crete as the probable birth-place of Christia- nity. That would be an hypothesis for secular scholarship alone, to prove or disprove. The admitted historic spectacle of the meet- ing of Indian and Egyptian elements at Alexandria was the only geographical factor of which he ever spoke. Nor did this in- tellectual dubiety in any way dim the bright- ness of his love for the Son of Mary. To Hindu thinking, it is the perfection of the 353 w
