he admits the possibility of absorption and identification with the deity, he holds that the double relation of a loving God and a loving soul constitutes greater bliss. "The saint was not absorbed into the divinity for this reason that he had already received the gift of faith."[620] And in a similar spirit he says, "Let those preach in their wisdom who contemplate Thee as the supreme spirit, the uncreate, inseparable from the universe, recognizable only by inference and beyond the understanding; but we, O Lord, will ever hymn the glories of thy incarnation." Like most Hindus he is little disposed to enquire what is the purpose of creation, but he comes very near to saying that God has evolved the world by the power of Mâyâ because the bliss which God and his beloved feel is greater than the bliss of impersonal undifferentiated divinity. It will be seen that Tulsi Das is thoroughly Hindu: neither his fundamental ideas nor his mythological embellishments owe anything to Islam or Christianity. He accepts unreservedly such principles as Mâyâ, transmigration, Karma and release. But his sentiments, more than those of any other Indian writer, bear a striking resemblance to the New Testament. Though he holds that the whole world is of God, he none the less bids men shun evil and choose the good, and the singular purity of his thoughts and style contrasts strongly with other Vishnuite works. He does not conceive of the love which may exist between the soul and God as a form of sexual passion. 2 The beginning of the sixteenth century was a time of religious upheaval in India for it witnessed the careers not only of Vallabhâcârya and Caitanya, but also of Nânak, the founder of the Sikhs. In the west it was the epoch of Luther and as in Europe so in India no great religious movement has taken place since that time. The sects then founded have swollen into extravagance and been reformed: other sects have arisen from a mixture of Hinduism with Moslem and Christian elements, but no new and original current of thought or devotion has been started. Though the two great sects associated with the names of Caitanya and Vallabhâcârya have different geographical spheres and also present some differences in doctrinal details, both are emotional and even erotic and both adore Kṛishṇa as a child or young man. Their almost simultaneous appearance in eastern and western India and their rapid growth show that they represent an unusually potent current of ideas and sentiments. But the worship of Kṛishṇa was, as we have seen, nothing new in northern India. Even that relatively late phase in which the sports of the divine herdsman are made to typify the love of God for human souls is at least as early as the Gîtâ-govinda written about 1170. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the history of Kṛishṇa worship is not clear,[621] but it persisted and about 1400 found speech in Bengal and in Rajputâna.