These, then, are the two great characteristics of the man who is to become the special manifestation of God--bhakti, love to the One in whom he is to merge, and love to those whose very life is the life of God. Only as these come forth in the man is he on the path that leads him to be--in future universes, in far, far future kalpas--an Avatâra coming as God to man. Now on this view of the nature of an Avatâra difficulties, I know, arise; but they are difficulties that arise from a partial view, and then from that view having been merely accepted, as a rule, on the authority of some great name, instead of on the thinking out and thorough understanding of it by the man who repeats the shibboleth of his own sect or school. The view once taken, every text in Shruti or Smṛiti that goes against that view is twisted out of its natural meaning, in order to be made to agree with the idea which already dominates the mind. That is the difficulty with every religion; a man acquires his view by tradition, by habit, by birth, by public opinion, by the surroundings of his own time and of his own day. He finds in the scriptures--which belong to no time, to no day, to no one age, and to no one people, but are expressions of the eternal Veda--he finds in them many texts that do not fit into the narrow framework that he has made; and because he too often cares for the framework more than for the truth, he manipulates the text until he can make it fit in, in some dislocated fashion; and the ingenuity of the commentator too often appears in the skill with which he can make words appear to mean what they do not mean in their grammatical and obvious sense. Thus, men of every school, under the mighty names of men who knew the truth--but who could only give such portion of truth as they deemed man at the time was able to receive--use their names to buttress up mistaken interpretations, and thus walls are continually built up to block the advancing life of man.