s which missionaries tell us
are wanting among pagans--fatherly love, yearning devotion and the
bliss of assured salvation. It is not surprising if many have seen in
this tone the result of Christian influence. Yet I do not think that
the hypothesis is probable. For striking as is the likeness the
contrast is often equally striking. The deity described in words which
almost literally render "Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear" is also
the spouse of Uma with the white breasts and curled locks; he dances
in the halls of Tillai; and the line "Bid thou in grace my fears
begone" is followed by two others indicated by dots as being "not
translateable."[536] Nor can we say that emotional religion here uses
the language of a mythology which it has outgrown. The emotion itself
while charged with the love of god, the sense of sin and contrition,
has in it another strain which jars on Europeans. Siva sports with the
world and his worshippers treat him with an affectionate intimacy
which may be paralleled in the religion of Krishna but hardly in
Christianity.[537] Thus several hymns have reference to a game, such
as tossing about a ball (hymn vii), battledore and shuttlecock (xiv)
or some form of wrestling in which the opponents place their hands on
each other's shoulders (xv). The worshipper can even scold the deity.
"If thou forsake me, I will make people smile at thee. I shall abuse
thee sore: madman clad in elephant skin: madman that ate the poison:
madman, who chose even me as thy own."[538]

Again, though in part the tone of these poems is Christian, yet they
contain little that suggests Christian doctrine. There is nothing
about redemption or a suffering god,[539] and many ideas common to
Christianity and Hinduism--such as the incarnation,[540] the Trinity,
and the divine child and his mother--are absent. It is possible that
in some of the later works of the Sittars Christian influence[541] may
have supervened but most of this Tamil poetry is explicable as the
development of the ideas expressed in the Bhagavad-gita and the
Svetasvatara Upanishad. Chronologically Christian influence is not
impossible and there is a tradition that Manikka-Vacagar reconverted
to Hinduism some natives of Malabar who had become Christians[542] but
the uncertainty of his date makes it hard to fix his place in the
history of doctrine. Recent Hindu scholars are disposed to assign him
to the second or third century.[543] In support of this, it is
pla