Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/230

222 and has not undergone its law, all that has not yielded up and does not will to yield up its secret of divine values, but presents a front of perversion and contradiction, of impurity, narrowness, bondage, darkness, weakness, vile- ness, discord and suffering and division, and the hideous and the crude, all that man has to leave behind in his progress. This is the adharma, not-dharma, which strives with and seeks to overcome the dharma, to draw. backward and downward, the reactionary force which makes for evil, ignorance and darkness. Between the two there is perpetual battle and struggle, oscillation of. _victory and defeat in which sometimes the upward and sometimes the downward forces prevail. This has been typefied in the Vedic image of the struggle between the divine and the Titanic powers, the sons of the Lightand the undivided Infinity and the children of the Darkness and Division, in Zoroastrianism by Ahuramazda and Ahriman, and in later religions in the contest between God and his angels and Satan or Iblis and his demons for the possession of human life and the human soul.

It is these things that condition and determine the work of the Avatar. Inthe Buddhisticformula the disci- ple takes refuge from all that opposes his liberation in three powers, the dharma, the sangha, the Buddha. So in Christianity we have the law of Christian living, the Churchand theChrist. These threeare always the neces- sary elements of the work of the Avatar. He gives a dharma, a law of self-discipline by which to grow out of the lower into the higher life and which necessarily includes a rule of action and of relations with our fellow- men and other beings, endeavour in the eightfold path or the law of faith, love and purity or any other such re- velation of the nature of thedivine in life. Then because