to the human Krishna and the divine Lord of the worlds, and giving their due weight to such passages as that in the ninth chapter “Deluded minds despise me lodged in the human body because they know not my supreme nature of being, Lord of all existences” ; and. we have to read in the light of these ideas this passage we find before us and its declaration that by the know- ledge of his divine birth and divine works man comes to the Divine and by becoming full of him and even as he and taking refuge in him they arrive at his nature and status of being, madbhdvam. For then we shall understand the divine birth and its object, not as an isolated and miraculous phenomenon, but in its proper place in the whole scheme of the world-mani- festation ; without that we cannot arrive at its divine mystery, but shall either scout it altogether or accept it ignorantly and, it may be, superstitiously or fall in- to the petty and superficial ideas of the modern mind about it by which it loses all its inner and helpful significance.
For to the modern mind Avatarhood is one of the most difficult to accept or, to understand of all the ideas that are streaming in from the East upon the rationalised human consciousness. It is apt to take it “at the best for a mere figure for some high manifesta- tion of human power, character, genius, great work done for the world or in the world, and at the worst to regard it as a superstition,—to the heathen a foolish- ness and to the Greeks a staumblingblock. The material- ist, necessarily, cannot even look at it, since he does not believe in God ; to the rationalist or the Deist it is a folly and a thing of derision; to the thoroughgoing
