"I produce myself among creatures, O son of Bharata, whenever
there is a decline of Virtue and an insurrection of vice and
injustice in the world: and thus I incarnate from age to age for
the preservation of the just, the destruction of the wicked, and
the establishment of righteousness."--_Bhagavad-Gita_
"The world had fallen into decay, and right principles had
perished. Perverse discourses and oppressive deeds had grown
rife; ministers murdered their rulers and sons their fathers.
Confucius was frightened at what he saw, and undertook the work
of reformation."--Mencius
Men were expecting an avatar in old Judaea; and, sure enough,
one came. But they were looking for a national leader, a
Messiah, to throw off for them the Roman yoke; or else for an
ascetic like their prophets of old time: something, in any case,
out of the way;--a personality wearing marks of avatarship easily
recognisable. The one who came, however, so far from leading them
against the Romans, seemed to have a good deal of sympathy with
the Romans. He consorted with centurions and tax-gatherers, and
advised the Jews to render unto Roman Caesar the things which
were his: which meant, chiefly, the tribute. And he was not an
ascetic, noticeably; bore no resemblance to their prophets of
old time; but came, as he said, 'eating and drinking'; even
went to marriage-feasts, and that by no means to play killjoy;--
and they said, 'Behold, a gluttonous man and a winebibber!'
(which was a lie).--Instead of supporting the national religion,
as anyone with half an eye to his interests would have done, he
did surprising things in the temple with a whip of small cords.--
"Here," said they, "let us crucify this damned fellow!" And
they did.
Aftertimes, however, recognised him as an avatar; and then so
perverse is man!--as the one and only possible avatar. If ever
another should appear, said our western world, it could but be
this one come again; and, because the doctrine of avatars is a
fundamental instinct in human nature, they expected that he would
come again. So when the pressure of the times and the intuition
of men warned them that a great incarnation was due, they began
to look for his coming.
That was in our own day, say in the last half-century; during
which time a mort of books have been written about a mysterious
figure turning up in some modern city, whom you could not fail
to recognise by certain infallible signs. Generally speaking,
the chief of these were: long hair, and a tendency to make
lugubrious remarks beginning with _Verily, verily I say unto
you._ In actual life, too, lots of men did grow their hair long
and cultivate the _verily-verily_ habit; hoping that, despite
their innate modesty, their fellow-men might not fail to take the
hint and pierce the disguise afforded, often by a personal
morality you might call _oblique._
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."