But if an avatar had come, it is fairly certain that he or she would have followed modern fashions in hair and speech; first, because real avatars have a sense of humor; and secondly, because his or her business would have been to reform, not the language or style of hair-dressing, but life.--'He or she' is a very vile phrase; for the sake of novelty, let us make the feminine include the masculine, and say 'she' simply.--Her conversation, then, instead of being peppered with archaic _verilies_ and _peradventures,_ would have been in form much like that of the rest of us. It is quite unlikely she would have shone at Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, or Bazaars of the Young Women's Christian Association; quite unlikely that she would have been in any sense whatever a pillar of the orthodoxies. As she would have come to preach _Truth,_ you may suppose Truth needed, and therefore lacking; and so, that her teachings would have been at once dubbed vilest heterodoxy, and herself a charlatan. "Below with eddy and flow the white tides creep On the sands." Says Ssu-k'ung T'u,-- "..... in no one form may Tao abide. But changes and shifts like the wide wing-shadows asweep On the mountainside"; --the sea is one, but the tides drift and eddy; the roc, or maybe the dragon, is one, but the shadow of his wings on the mountain sward shifts and changes and veers. When you think you have set up a standard for Tao: when you imagine you have grasped it in you hands:--how fleet it is to vanish! "The man of Tao," said the fisherman of the Mi-lo to Ch'u Yuan, "does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adapts himself to them";--and perhaps there you have the best possible explanation of the nature of those Great souls who come from time to time to save the world. I think we take the Buddha as the type of them; and expect not only a life and character that _we can recognise_ as flawless, but also a profundity of revelation in the philosophy and ethics. But if no two blades of grass are alike, much less are two human Souls; and in these Great Ones, it is the picture of Souls we are given. When we think that if all men were perfect, all would be alike, we err with a wide mistake. The nearer you get to the Soul, and the more perfect is the expression of it, the less is there monotony or similarity; and almost the one thing you may posit about any avatar is, that he will be a surprise. Tom and Dick and Harry are alike: 'pipe and stick young men'; 'pint and steak young men'; they get born and marry and die, and the grass grows over them with wondrous alikeness; but when the Masters of Men come, all the elements are cast afresh.