Our survey of the religion of Vāsudēva has brought us down to a date which cannot indeed be exactly fixed, but which may be placed approximately in the second century of our era. This religion, as we have seen, arose and grew great in the fertile soil of the spiritual needs and experiences of India. It began by moulding a personal God out of ancient figures of myth and legend, and it surrounded him with a hierarchy of godly heroes. Though its doctrines were often philosophically incongruous and incoherent, its foundation was a true religious feeling; it gave scope to the mystic raptures of the ascetic and the simple righteousness of the laic; and it claimed for its heroes, Vāsudēva and his kindred and his friends the Pāṇḍava brethren, a grave and dignified hero-worship. In short, it is a serious Indian religion with an epic setting. And now suddenly and most unexpectedly an utterly new spirit begins to breathe in it. To the old teachings and legends are added new ones of a wholly different cast. The old epic spirit of grave and manly chivalry and godly wisdom is overshadowed by a new passion--adoration of tender babyhood and wanton childhood, amorous ecstasies, a hectic fire of erotic romance. Of this new spirit there is no trace in the epic, except in one or two late interpolations. But the Hari-vaṃśa, which was added as an appendix to the Mahābhārata not very long before the fourth century A.D., is already instinct with it. It adds to the epic story of Kṛishṇa a fluent verse account of his miraculous preservation from Kaṃsa at his birth, his childhood among the herdsmen and herdswomen of Vraja (the Doab near Mathurā) with its marvellous freaks and wonderful exploits, his amorous sports with the herdswomen, in fact all the sensuous emotionalism on which the later church of Kṛishṇa has ever since battened. About the same time appeared the Vishṇu-purāṇa, which includes most of the same matter as the Hari-vaṃśa; and some centuries later, probably about the tenth century, there was written a still more remarkable book, the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, of which a great part is taken up with the romance of Kṛishṇa's babyhood and childhood, and especially his amorous sports. In the Bhāgavata the later worship of Kṛishṇa found its classic expression. In the Hari-vaṃśa and Vishṇu-purāṇa religious emotion is still held under a certain restraint; but in the Bhāgavata it has broken loose and runs riot. It is a romance of ecstatic love for Kṛishṇa, who is no longer, as in the Vishṇu-purāṇa, the incarnation of a portion of the Supreme Vishṇu, but very God become man, wholly and utterly divine in his humanity. It dwells in a rapture of tenderness upon the God-babe, and upon the wanton play of the lovely child who is delightful in his naughtiness and marvellous in his occasional displays of superhuman power; it figures him as an ideal of boyish beauty, decked with jewels and crested with peacock's feathers, wandering through the flowering