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He was of the type that went out to the War from 1914 to 1918, and won it, despite the many mistakes of our flurried strategicians: the type that so long as it lasts unspoilt will make England the predominant partner, and Great Britain the predominant nation; the type out of which are made the bluejacket and petty officer, the police sergeant, the engine driver, the railway guard, solicitor's clerk, merchant service mate, engineer, air-pilot, chauffeur, army non-commissioned officer, head gardener, head game-keeper, farm-bailiff, head printer; the trustworthy manservant, the commissionaire of a City Office; and which in other avatars ran the British World on an average annual income of £150 before the War.
Nevertheless, the highest truths are incomprehensible except to those who have already attained to Buddha-hood. In its history the Ten-dai sect has followed out its logic. The three sub-sects still differ in their worship of the avatars selected as supreme deities, but their philosophy enables them to sweep in the Buddhas of every age and clime, name and nation.
If Chamberlain and Salisbury had been the avatars of Pericles and Phidias, they would have used the nine hundred millions of dollars wasted in South Africa, and the services of those three hundred thousand men, and done in England, aye! or done in South Africa, a work of harmony and undying beauty such as this tired earth had not seen since Phidias wrought and Pindar sang.
Other avatars, like Babaji, undertake work which is concerned more with the slow evolutionary progress of man during the centuries than with any one outstanding event of history. Such masters always veil themselves from the gross public gaze, and have the power to become invisible at will.
A sweeping formula which allows us to foresee all the future avatars of the materialist doctrine, and to class them beforehand in the same category. The criticisms which have been directed against materialism are all, or nearly all, variations of the principle of heterogeneity.
Even may we not say that, along with other reasons for the disappearance of Buddhism from India, some response more satisfying to the human need must have been offered by the rival system of Hinduism. Hinduism has deities and avatars; Buddhism had none. Yet the worship at neither place to-day is Buddhist.
The end of a kalpa, or cycle of manifestation, is symbolized by the presence on a planet of many avatars, masters, and angels. By their very presence these enlightened ones arouse in all who are ready for the experience a glimpse of that state of being to which all souls are destined, and to which all shall ultimately attain.
And they did. Aftertimes, however, recognised him as an avatar; and then so perverse is man! as the one and only possible avatar. If ever another should appear, said our western world, it could but be this one come again; and, because the doctrine of avatars is a fundamental instinct in human nature, they expected that he would come again.
How different the view opened to us by the possibility of soul being apportioned in various measure among the lower animals: there is a clue given "to justify the ways of God to" brutes: we need not then consider, with a certain French abbé, that they are fallen angels, doing penance for their sins; we need not, with old Pythagoras and latter Brahmins, account them stationed lodges, homes of transmigration for the spirits of men in process of being purged from their offences: we need not regard them as Avatars of Vishnu, or incarnations of Apis, visible deities craving the idolatries of India and Egypt.
With the spiritual pride of men who feel themselves to be the incarnations or avatars of immutable law, they are inclined to look down with something very like contempt on mere empirics who are ignorant of scientific principles and are guided by considerations of practical expediency.
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