Page:The Rámáyana of Tulsi Dás.djvu/34

xiv it is Krishna who figures as the embodiment of the Supreme Being, and both in the name and in the legends of Krishna there is a superficial resemblance to the name of Christ and to some of the incidents recorded of Him in the Gospels. As I have shown more fully elsewhere, there is no historical basis for the supposed connection, while the similarity of name is demonstrably accidental. The doctrine appears to have grown up as a natural sequel to the purely indigenous school of thought in which we find it established, and an exact parallel can he traced in the history of Buddhism, where the nihilism of Nirvána was practically abrogated by the gradual deification of its teacher. In selecting Ráma as his ideal of the divine in preference to Krishna, Tulsi Dás has certainly improved upon the teaching of the Bhagavad.

The tendency of modern scientific thought is setting strongly in favour of the Vedantist theory; as declaring the existence from all eternity of a personal God to be simply unknowable, and referring all phenomena to a strange mysterious energy, or will, that pervades all nature, that produces all the work done on the face of the earth, and is probably at the root of life itself; invisible and insensible, and exhibited only in its effects. Such a theory—as we see from our author's own case—is by no means incompatible with a belief in a divine incarnation: the difficulty is to establish by historical proof that such and such a character—Ráma, or Krishna, or whoever it may be—was really born out of the ordinary course of nature, really performed the marvellous acts ascribed to him, for the deliverance of the Saints, the overthrow of the wicked and the establishment of righteousness, and having accomplished them was again taken up into the heaven from which he came. The whole of Tulsi Dás's Rámáyana is a passionate protest against the virtual atheism of philosophical Hindu theology. The problem that confronted him is the very same that now most exercises the thought of the nineteenth century. If the Supreme Being is a personal God, he must be limited by the conditions of personality, and can neither be omniscient nor omnipotent. If, on the other hand, the Deity is an omnipresent, all-pervading impersonality, how can any special relation be developed between such an abstraction and the individual soul? The difficulty is one that has its root in the nature of things; and no solution of the mystery can be found but in the recognition of faith and reason as two distinct human faculties, with the infinite and the finite as their separate provinces. In the words of Saint Ambrose, non in dialecticâ complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum. God would not be adorable, if he were not incomprehensible; and a religion that does not transcend man's