im to the sixteenth century, which is probably quite near
enough to the truth.[38]

[Footnote 38: See Dineshchandra Sen, _Folk-literature of Bengal_, p.
99 ff.]

The next instance belongs to the twentieth century. A few years ago
there died in the village of Eral, in Tinnevelly District, a local
gentleman of the Shanar caste named Arunachala Nadar. There was
nothing remarkable about his career: he had lived a highly respectable
life, scrupulously fulfilled his religious duties, and served with
credit as chairman of the municipal board in his native village. If he
had done something prodigiously wicked, one might have expected him to
become a local god at once, in accordance with Dravidian precedent;
but he being what he was, his post-mortem career is rather curious.
For a legend gradually arose that his kindly spirit haunted a certain
place, and little by little it has grown until now there is a regular
worship of him in Eral, and pilgrims travel thither to receive his
blessings, stimulated by a lively literary propaganda. He is
worshipped under the name of "The Chairman God," in affectionate
memory of his municipal career, and as Jagadisa, or "Lord of the
Universe," a phase of the god Siva.

CONCLUSION

Can we trace any uniform principle running through the bewildering
variety of changes that we have observed?

Consider the changes through which Vishnu has passed. At the beginning
a spirit of vaguely defined personality, he appears successively as a
saviour-god, as the mystic saint Narayana, as the epic warriors
Krishna and Rama, as a wanton blue-skinned herd-boy fluting and
dancing amidst a crowd of wildly amorous women, and as the noble ideal
of God preached by the great Maratha and Ramanandi votaries, not to
mention the many other incarnations that have delighted the Hindu
imagination. What does all this mean? It means that the history of a
god is mainly moulded by two great factors, the growth of the people's
spiritual experience and the character of its religious teachers. As
the stream of history rolls on, it fills men's souls with deeper and
wider understanding of life. Old conceptions are pondered upon,
explored, tested, sometimes rejected, sometimes accepted with a new
and profounder content, and thus enlarged they are applied to the old
ideals of godhead. When Indian society had organised itself out of
tribal chaos and settled down under an established monarchical
government, it made Indra the