and raises the whole question of the meaning of God in the world and the goal and drift and sense of human life and conduct.
India has from ancient times held strongly a belief in the reality of the Avatara, the descent into form, the revelation of the Godhead in humanity. In the West this belief has never really stamped itself upon the mind because it has been presented through exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma without any roots in the reason and general consciousness and attitude towards life. But in India it has grown up and persisted as a logical outcome of the Vedantic view of life and taken firm root in the consciousness of the race. Al] existence is a manifestation of God because He is the only existence and nothing can be except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in some way a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of name and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is a gradation between the supteme being [1] of the Divine and the consciousness shrouded partly or wholly by ignorance of self in the finite. The conscious embodied soul [2] is the spark of the divine Fire and that soul in man opens out to self-knowlelge as it develops out of ignorance of self into self-being. The Divine also, pouring itself into the forms of the cosmic existence, is revealed ordinarily in an efflorescence of its powers, in energies and magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force of being, [3] in degrees and faces of its divinity. But when the divine Consciousness and Power, taking upon itself the human form and the
