in after time became the prominent feature of the worship of Siva and his consort all over India, viz. the feature represented by the _linga_, or phallic symbol. As regards Vishnu, the epic poems, including the supplement to the Mahabharata, the Harivamsa, supply practically the entire framework of legendary matter on which the later Vaishnava creeds are based. The theory of Avataras which makes the deity--also variously called Narayana, Purushottama, or Vasudeva--periodically assume some material form in order to rescue the world from some great calamity, is fully developed; the ten universally recognized "descents" being enumerated in the larger poem. Though Siva, too, assumes various forms, the incarnation theory is peculiarly characteristic of Vaishnavism; and the fact that the principal hero of the Ramayana (Rama), and one of the prominent warriors of the Mahabharata (Krishna) become in this way identified with the supreme god, and remain to this day the chief objects of the adoration of Vaishnava sectaries, naturally imparts to these creeds a human interest and sympathetic aspect which is wholly wanting in the worship of Siva. It is, however, unfortunately but too true that in some of these creeds the devotional ardour has developed features of a highly objectionable character. Even granting the reasonableness of the triple manifestation of the Divine Spirit, how is one to reconcile all these idolatrous practices, this worship of countless gods and godlings, demons and spirits indwelling in every imaginable object round about us, with the pantheistic doctrine of the _Ekam Advitiyam_, "the One without a Second"? The Indian theosophist would doubtless have little difficulty in answering that question. For him there is only the One Absolute Being, the one reality that is all in all; whilst all the phenomenal existences and occurrences that crowd upon our senses are nothing more than an illusion of the individual soul estranged for a time from its divine source--an illusion only to be dispelled in the end by the soul's fuller knowledge of its own true nature and its being one with the eternal fountain of blissful being. But to the man of ordinary understanding, unused to the rarefied atmosphere of abstract thought, this conception of a transcendental, impersonal Spirit and the unreality of the phenomenal world can have no meaning: what he requires is a deity that stands in intimate relation to things material and to all that affects man's life. Hence the exoteric theory of manifestations of the Supreme Spirit; and that not only the manifestations implied in the triad of gods representing the cardinal processes of mundane existence--creation, preservation, and destruction or regeneration--but even such as would tend to supply a rational explanation for superstitious imaginings of every kind. For "the Indian philosophy does not ignore or hold aloof from the religion