I70 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
much oftener than in the Mahabharata; though that also was meant to prove the identity of a certain hero with Vishnu. Sita-Rama are from the very beginning argued as the bodying-forth of Lakshmi-Narayana in human form. Krishna in the later epic seems to be consciously a second attempt to paint the mercy of God in incarnation.
The ideas that succeed in India are always firm-based on the national past. Thus that idealism of the motherland which is to-day the growing force intellectually can go back for foundation to the story of Uma, wedded in austerity to the great God. Similarly it would be very interesting to see worked out by some Indian scholar the root- sources in Vedic literature of these conceptions of Shiva and Vishnu. One can hardly resist the conclusion that each was elaborated independently in its own region.
We have to think of the Mother Church as the expression of a people who, between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500, were intensely modern and alive. Indian civilisation has educated its children from the beginning to the supreme function of realising ideas. And ideas grew and succeeded each other, taking on new forms with amazing rapidity, in the period immediately before and after the Christian era. The impression that the chief formative impulse here was the life and character of Buddha is extremely difficult to resist. On one side the stern monastic; on the other, the very projection into humanity of the Infinite Compassion—the
