monarchical government, it made Indra the king of the gods, ruling with the same forms and under the same conditions as a human sovereign. When men of finer cast realised that the kingdom of the spirit is higher than earthly royalty, they turned away from Indra and set their souls upon greater conceptions, ideals of vaster spiritual forces, mystic infinitudes. Attracted thus to worships such as those of Śiva and Vishṇu, they filled them with their own visions and imparted to these gods the ideals of their own strivings, making them into Yōgīśvaras, Supreme Mystics. And so the sequence of change has gone on through the generations. Most potently it has been effected by the characters of the preachers and teachers of religion. Almost every teacher who has a personality of his own, whose soul contains thoughts other than those of the common sort, stamps something of his own type upon the ideal of his god which he imparts to his followers, and which may thereby come to be authoritatively recognised as a canonical character of the god. India is peculiarly liable to this transference of personality from the guru to the god whom the guru preaches, because from immemorial times India has regarded the guru as representative of the god, and often deifies him as a permanent phase of the deity. Śaivas declare that in the guru who teaches the way of salvation Śiva himself is manifested: Vaishṇavas tell the same
