has for the most part
remained subordinate to the worship of Vishnu, though the Vaishnava
church there has from early times recognised the divinity of both of
them as embodiments of the Almighty. But its great home is the North,
where millions worship Rama with passionate and all-absorbing love.

[Footnote 30: I regret that I cannot accept the ingenious hypothesis
lately put forward by Rai Saheb Dineshchandra Sen in his _Bengali
Ramayanas_. The story of the Dasaratha-jataka seems to me to be a
garbled and bowdlerised snippet cut off from a possibly pre-Valmikian
version of the old Rama-saga; the rest of the theory appears to be
quite mistaken.]

III. SOME LATER PREACHERS

With all its attractions and success, the new Krishnaism did not
everywhere overgrow the older stock upon which it had been engrafted.
There were many places in which the early worship of Vishnu and
Vasudeva remained almost unchanged. The new legends of Krishna's
childhood might indeed be accepted in these centres of conservatism,
but they made little difference in the spirit and form of the worship,
which continued to follow the ancient order. In some of them the
Bhagavad-gita, Narayaniya, and other epic doctrinals still remained
the standard texts, which theologians connected with the ancient
Upanishads and the Brahma-sutra summarising the latter; in other
centres there arose, beginning perhaps about the seventh century A.D.,
a series of Samhitas, or manuals of doctrine and practice for the
Pancharatra[31] sect, which, though in essentials agreeing with the
Narayaniya, taught a different theory of cosmogony and introduced the
worship of the goddess Sri or Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu, as the
agency or energy through which the Supreme Being becomes active in
finite existence; and in yet other places other texts were followed,
such as those of the Vaikhanasa school. This worship of
Vishnu-Vasudeva on the ancient lines was peculiarly vigorous among the
representatives of Aryan culture in the South, who had introduced the
cults of Vishnu and Siva with the rest of the Aryan pantheon into the
midst of Dravidian animism. Hinduism, transplanted into the Dravidian
area, has there remained more conservative than anywhere else, and has
clung firmly to its ancient traditions. There is nothing of Dravidian
origin in the South Indian worship of Vishnu and Siva; they are
entirely Aryan importations. But they have become thoroughly
assimilated in their sout