Page 9 - All India Magazine Aug-2025

be in danger of excluding a most important part of the work done
by the Avatar. Always we see in the history of the divine incarna-
tions the double work, and inevitably, because the Avatar takes
up the workings of God in human life, the way of the divine Will
and Wisdom in the world, and that always fulfils itself externally
as well as internally, by inner progress in the soul and by an outer
change in the life.
The Avatar may descend as a great spiritual teacher and sav-
iour, the Christ, the Buddha, but always his work leads, after he
has finished his earthly manifestation, to a profound and powerful
change not only in the ethical, but in the social and outward life
and ideals of the race. He may, on the other hand, descend as
an incarnation of the divine life, the divine personality and power
in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical
and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna;
but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a
permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth. It is
indeed curious to note that the permanent, vital, universal effect
of Buddhism and Christianity has been the force of their ethical,
social and practical ideals and their influence even on the men and
the ages which have rejected their religious and spiritual beliefs,
forms and disciplines; later Hinduism which rejected Buddha, his
sangha, and his dharma, bears the ineffaceable imprint of the so-
cial and ethical influence of Buddhism and its effect on the ideas
and the life of the race, while in modern Europe, Christian only
in name, humanitarianism is the translation into the ethical and
social sphere and the aspiration to liberty, equality and fraternity
the translation into the social and political sphere of the spiritual
truths of Christianity, the latter especially being effected by men
who aggressively rejected the Christian religion and spiritual disci-
pline and by an age which in its intellectual effort of emancipation
tried to get rid of Christianity as a creed. On the other hand the
life of Rama and Krishna belongs to the prehistoric past which has

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